Coronavirus Outbreaks: What Role Do Children Play?
Christiane Fux studied journalism and psychology in Hamburg. The experienced medical editor has been writing magazine articles, news and factual texts on all conceivable health topics since 2001. In addition to her work for, Christiane Fux is also active in prose. Her first crime novel was published in 2012, and she also writes, designs and publishes her own crime plays.
More posts by Christiane Fux All content is checked by medical journalists.Children are still puzzling Covid-19 researchers. Do they rarely become infected, even under normal conditions, and also rarely pass the virus on? Is it the other way around? Or completely different?
The pandemic times are normalizing. Schools and childcare facilities are also gradually opening up. However, it is still unclear whether new bushfires of the pandemic could flare up there again, which in the worst case could escalate into the dreaded conflagration.
Science is still nibbling on the questions that need to be answered: How often do children get infected with Sars-CoV-2? And how often do they pass the infection on?
Children fly under the radar
The answer is difficult, also because more often than adults infected children are only slightly ill or develop no symptoms at all. Children were therefore also tested for the virus much less often. This is why so few of them appear in the statistics. You are by and large flying under the radar. How many have become infected is difficult to find out.
State of emergency distorts study data
Also because at the time when studies on stakeout were being carried out, there was a state of emergency almost everywhere - and especially for the children. Closed schools and day-care centers, cordoned-off playgrounds, and playing with friends are prohibited. The only sources of infection for children were usually their own parents. Accordingly, children are underrepresented in many studies.
Many viruses also in children's throats
Instead of using statistics, a Charité team headed by Prof. Christiane Drosten tried a different method. The researchers wanted to at least investigate the question of how infectious children can be. As a large number of throat swabs from Sars-CoV-2 infected people were available to them thanks to the large Hamburg clinic, they compared the amount of viruses in the samples from the various age groups.
The pre-publication of the study recently caused a stir, fueled by the Bild newspaper. The main focus was on the statistical evaluation of the investigation. But statistics were only marginally involved here.
Children could also be highly contagious
Much more important and unaffected by statistics is the following result: The researchers found similar amounts of viruses in the throat of children as in that of adults. Whether this is the normal case cannot yet be conclusively determined - the number of children tested, especially the very young, was not high enough for that. Yet there is nothing to prevent children from being as contagious as adults.
But in order to actually pass the virus on, children would have to have previously infected themselves somewhere - which, as stated above, was difficult to do during the survey period of most studies. Therefore there is no data on this. It is conceivable, for example, that the immune system of young children is particularly good at warding off the virus.
Do children get infected less often?
A study from China seems to support this assumption. The researchers had examined which family members became infected during the quarantine if a family member was infected. While 17 percent of the adults were infected, it was only four percent of the children.
But the result only seems clear at first glance - because there were no natural conditions here either. For example, the children could have been kept away from the sick person while the adults looked after the sick person.
Are there differences between older and younger children?
An Icelandic study showed that children under the age of ten were less likely to be infected than older children. It is unclear whether this is actually due to a natural immune protection of the little ones or the fact that they meet fewer people overall.
Shaky data from Baden-Württemberg
Baden-Württemberg is also basing its plans to reopen day care centers and elementary schools at the end of June on the interim results of a study. For these, 2,500 children under ten years of age and one parent each were tested for antibodies, among other things.
According to this, children would have contracted an infection less often than their parents. This also applied to the exceptions among the children who were in day care and thus had more contacts. But even these children were in fixed groups - unlike their parents, who might have had more contact outside the home, for example at work. This is also not reliable proof, especially since the study has not yet been conclusively evaluated.
In Sweden all age groups are equal
A Swedish study also speaks against the assumption that children are infected less often than adults. It is interesting against the background that in Sweden, unlike almost everywhere else, schools and childcare facilities remained open. Likewise shops and restaurants. So there were halfway natural conditions.
Here, the researchers carried out representative antibody tests in the population, i.e. tested which people had already survived a Sars-CoV-2 infection. Another decisive advantage over other studies was that it was a randomly selected sample - and not volunteers. The latter could falsify the result because they suspect that they were infected beforehand.
The result of the study: Among all participants with antibodies in their blood, the proportion of children and adolescents up to 15 years of age was the highest at 2.8 percent. At 2.0 percent, it was lowest in the group of people over 60. Young adults between 16 and 29 years had 2.4 percent of the infection, those 30 to 59 year olds 2.6 percent. Overall, the proportion of antibody positives in the population was therefore very evenly distributed.
The bottom line: There are still a lot of unanswered questions that can only be clarified in the future. For example, whether younger children may be less susceptible to the virus, which is then compensated for by more frequent and closer physical contact under normal conditions, so that the little ones ultimately infect as many people as other age groups.
Reduce the risk of and from outbreaks
Nevertheless, the schools and daycare kindergartens are now reopening. And that is urgently needed. Children particularly suffer from the measures taken to contain the coronavirus pandemic: no friends, no kindergarten, no meeting with grandma and grandpa, suddenly learning on their own. Children whose parents are less able to cope with this fall behind even more than before.
What remains is to develop suitable concepts on how to prevent outbreaks among children as much as possible and, in the event of an emergency, to uncover them as quickly as possible - and how best to react then. So that the bushfires don't turn into a wildfire after all.
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