What you know so far about COVID-19 and children

President Donald Trump was censored on Facebook and Twitter after saying that the children were “mostly immune” from COVID-19. What do you say in fact?

We do know that children are less likely to get serious illness Coronavirus, And new evidence suggests that they too are unlikely to be infected.

What isn’t clear is how much the once infected virus has spread.

Children are rarely ill

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) statistics show that under 18 years of age account for only 2% of hospitalized COVID-19 patients and less than 0.1% of all deaths in the United States.

Between February 1 and August 1, a total of 45 children died of coronavirus in the United States (compared to 105 children who died of seasonal flu, no child died of any cause during the period. Out of 13,000).

If they get the virus, children are much less likely than adults to be severely ill.

A informative study of 2,143 confirmed or suspected coronaviruses among Chinese children found that 94% of cases were asymptomatic, mild or moderate.

Sick children often have underlying illnesses. In one study, all 10 pediatric patients admitted to Chicago in March and April with COVID-19 in March and April were either pre-existing or co-infected.

The conclusion here is that children are far less ill and die of COVID-19 than adults, but that does not mean they are immune.

In limited studies, infants (under 1 year) are at risk Older children..

Given that children are susceptible to severe cases of influenza, it is worth emphasizing that children were not susceptible to COVID-19 at the beginning of the pandemic.

There is also a very rare postviral condition called multisystem inflammatory syndrome (MIS-C) that develops about a month after SARS-CoV-2 infection and causes painful inflammation of multiple organs.

As of July 15, CDC reported 342 cases and 6 deaths, with a mortality rate of less than 2%. The average age is 8 years and 70% of cases are Hispanic or Black child..

They seem less likely to get the virus

The next question is whether children are the main driver of viral infections. It is divided into two parts: 1) How easy is it to get infected? 2) Once you have a virus, how much do you spread it?

Currently, there are some studies on the first part that seem to really suggest that children, especially younger children, are less likely to get infected.

Icelandic researchers have selected over 13,000 virus screens, including about 850 children under the age of 10. The overall prevalence of coronavirus was 0.8%, but children under the age of 10 were not infected.

Similar studies conducted in Spain, Italy and Switzerland all yielded similar results, showing that children have a much lower prevalence of infectious diseases than adults.

However, this is still an area of ​​research.

In the United States, Chief of Infectious Diseases, Anthony Fauci, investigated infection rates and infection rates in children and adults, and the results are expected by December.

I do not yet know how contagious children are infected

This is probably the most pressing issue when authorities consider when and how to reopen school.

If children are the primary spreaders, they can cause new outbreaks within their homes and communities-unfortunately, the evidence at this time is mixed.

A study in Chicago last week found that children under the age of five have 10-100 times higher levels of viral nucleic acid in their noses than adults.

This genetic material propagates the virus in the laboratory, so the authors suggested that children are probably important drivers of transmission.

The hypothesis deserves more research, but has not yet been proven.

Another way to tackle the problem is to use epidemiological lenses. So what happened in real life?

On the one hand, a magnificent cluster erupted. For example, in a summer camp in Georgia, USA, hundreds of masked children sleeping together in a large dormitory were infected.

Israel was also a note with outbreaks in multiple schools that infected hundreds of students, teachers and relatives.

Conversely, a large South Korean study has shown that children under the age of 10 contract household contact at a much lower rate than children over the age of 10.

No one knows for sure what might be the reason a child seems to be less susceptible to infection, but there are ideas.

Perhaps the virus cannot latch as easily as the child’s cell receptor.

Another theory that has gained more traction is that the four coronaviruses that cause the common cold are remembered by the body’s T cells—White blood cell Fight infections — it provides cross immunity.

Since Children They often have a cold, so they may be more immune than adults.

The hypothesis remains tested through extensive screening.

© 2020 AFP