Kids likely don’t play ‘significant role’ in passing coronavirus to adults, report says
Early data on the demographics of COVID-19 cases have indicated children are less likely to be affected by the virus. Until recently, most experts assumed they were asymptomatic carriers.
Not quite, a new report has found.
“The role of children in transmission is unclear, but it seems likely they do not play a significant role,” a new report based on a compilation of pediatric studies concluded.
Don’t Forget The Bubbles — a blog for medical professionals specializing in pediatrics — partnered with the UK Royal College of Pediatrics and Child Health to track and review studies on COVID-19 in children, according to its website. Using research from 78 of those studies, it released a 45-page report on April 22 that extracts early findings on the epidemiology, transmission and symptoms of the coronavirus in children.
The report concedes, however, that much of the evidence “is of low quality” due to the speed at which it was gathered given the rush to understand the novel coronavirus.
They also highlighted other issues involving indirect comparisons due to the way cases were collected, the possibility of duplicated patients in multiple studies from the same area, and several papers that haven’t yet been peer-reviewed.
Still, DFTB said its own summary of the data underwent internal peer review and will be open to external review from readers.
According to the report, data from China indicate “children were significantly less affected by infection with SARS-CoV-2 than their adult counterparts” — both in terms of case numbers and severity.
That data has since been replicated in other countries, including those with widespread community testing, DFTB said.
Only about 0.6% of cases in Chinese children who tested positive resulted in critical illness, the report found.
There is, however, a growing concern in the UK over a new COVID-19-related syndrome found in children, McClatchy News reported.
The British National Health Service has warned it’s similar to toxic shock and atypical Kawasaki disease, a condition that causes heart disease. It’s appeared in both children who have — and haven’t — tested positive for the coronavirus, according to McClatchy.
Details remain unclear on transmission in children, but low case numbers would indicate “a more limited role than was initially feared,” according to DFTB’s report.
Those that do have it were also more likely to be asymptomatic — making it difficult to trace how the disease is passed on.
Dr. Cameron Robert Wolfe, an associate professor of medicine at Duke University, previously told McClatchy News that future antibody surveys could very well indicate many of the people who were infected but didn’t show symptoms were kids.
He said the “highly infectious little bundles” could consequently be shedding the virus without knowing.
“If you’re a mild to moderately sick child, you just have less control over where these secretions are going,” Wolfe said, referring to the runny noses, coughs and sneezes that often accompany illnesses. “Most adults practice better hygiene.”
DFTB’s report echoed the idea that children “tend to have more mild illness” with the coronavirus, where only a cough and fever are present.
And in an earlier study, the China-World Health Organization joint commission “could not recall episodes during contact tracing where transmission occurred from a child to an adult,” the report states.
DFTB pointed to “multiple family clusters” where the child wasn’t the originating case, including one who tested positive in the French Alps but didn’t transmit it to anyone else despite being exposed to more than 100 people.
The “vast majority” of newborns whose mothers had the virus were also unlikely to contract it, the report states. Those that did “have not suffered any complications of the disease and required minimal respiratory support.”
DFTB concluded the overall impact of the coronavirus on children was minimal.
“COVID-19 appears to affect children less often, and with less severity, including frequent asymptomatic or subclinical infection,” the report’s conclusion states. “There is evidence of critical illness, but it is rare.”
This story was originally published April 30, 2020 at 5:21 PM with the headline "Kids likely don’t play ‘significant role’ in passing coronavirus to adults, report says."
