Coronavirus Update: Children Don’t Transmit Covid-19 To Adults, Report Says

Coronavirus appears to affect children less often and less severely compared to the general population. There is also very limited evidence that kids can pass the infection to others, according to a new report.

“Following the initial epidemiological data released from China, it appeared children were significantly less affected by infection with SARS-CoV-2 than their adult counterparts. This was reflected both in total case numbers, but also severity, with very few cases in young children and no deaths in children under 10 yrs,” said the report published by Don’t Forget The Bubbles.

Most children infected with the coronavirus might not exhibit symptoms and only in rare cases do they become critically ill, according to a recent analysis of global virus studies compiled by the report.

Key findings of the report:

• To date, just a handful of COVID-19-related mortalities have been reported in children.
• Not even a single case of a child passing the coronavirus to an adult has been reported by the World Health Organization (WHO).
• The low rates of COVID-19 cases in children might be mainly due to the fact that a large number of them are asymptomatic and not because the infection rate is low among kids.
• There are no clearly reported precise details pertaining to the pediatric transmission of the virus.
• Only a very small number of infants and newborns contract the coronavirus infection and they generally overcome the disease very well.
• Amongst both the confirmed and suspected cases detected by contact tracing, 32% of kids aged 6-10 years did not exhibit any COVID-19 symptoms.
• Data from countries including South Korea and Iceland which has undertaken community testing has also demonstrated significantly lower COVID-19 cases in children.
• In the Italian town of Vo which screened 70% of its population found 0 children below 10 years of age test COVID-19 positive.
• Despite exposure to over a hundred individuals, a SARS-CoV-2 positive child in a cluster in the French alps did not transmit the disease to anyone else.
• Research from Germany did not find any live, culturable virus from stool samples of infants.
• Blood tests of children revealed that children had normal or sometimes raised lymphocyte counts.
• Radiographic features including chest x-rays and CT chest scans were also found to be normal in children.
• Only a very small number of infants have contracted COVID-19, they did not suffer any complications and required minimal respiratory support.

“ The role of children in the transmission is unclear, but it seems likely they do not play a significant role,” concluded the report.