Children can actually get the coronavirus.
The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP and the Children’s Hospital Association) publicly analyzed reported data on children and COVID-19 from 49 states, Puerto Rico and Guam, as well as New York City and Washington, DC. Their report found that from July 30, at least 338,982 children have tested positive for COVID-19 since the pandemic began, but the caseload could well be higher, as this report lacks complete data from Texas and parts of the state of New York outside of NYC.
While that number may seem small compared to the overall 5 million confirmed cases of COVID-19 in the US, what’s more alarming is that more than a quarter of those cases in children – or a little over 97,000 children – were reported in just the last two weeks of July. That marks a 40% increase in the number of American children testing positive between July 16 and July 30. And at least 86 children have died from COVID-19 since May.
This spike in confirmed cases among children occurs when schools across the country begin to open for the fall. More than seven out of 10 of these new childhood cases were recorded in states in the south and west, according to the report, with Missouri, Oklahoma, Alaska, Nevada, Idaho and Montana among the states with the highest percentage increase in childhood infections. Many of these states also saw infections in the total spike population by the end of July, according to the New York Times tracker of cases by state.
Northeastern states and cities, including New Jersey, such as NYC, showed more hopeful signs of containing the virus in the AAP report, as well as having the lowest percentage of child deaths, despite an early U.S. epidemic in March and April. In fact, the New York Prime Minister announced Monday that COVID-19 hospitalizations and ICU patients in the state have dropped to their lowest levels since March.
It should be noted that the age at which patients are considered “children” varies in different states. While some states consider children to be anyone under 17 or 19, Florida and Utah have limited the age limit to 14, while Alabama has counted everyone under 24 as a child.
The new report found that children in general rarely became seriously ill with COVID-19, and they were less likely to be admitted to hospital than adults. But the AAP also warned last week that black and Hispanic children have much higher rates of infection and hospitalization with COVID-19, as well as worse disease and coronavirus-related complications, compared to non-Hispanic white children. This is similar to other studies that have shown adult minority populations, and Americans from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, have been hit much harder during the pandemic.
The CDC also recently reported that Black and Spanish children are more likely to suffer from the rare but potentially fatal multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children (MIS-C) that is believed to result from children exposed to the coronavirus. Of the 570 cases of MIS-C reported to the CDC by July 29, nearly three in four (more than 74%) were in Black and Spanish children.
Related:What parents need to know about the mysterious coronavirus-related disease affecting children: multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children
The barrage of new studies and reports on children and COVID-19 comes as cities and states struggle with when they need to reopen schools, and how to do so in a safe way. Meanwhile, parents are considering whether to trust them to send their children back to classrooms, or whether they are spending large sums of money to provide toddlers and homeschooling programs together to enroll their children in smaller groups.
In fact, some schools that have already tried to reopen have had to close again because students and staff test positive for the coronavirus. They include the Georgian high school that went viral last week after students took photos of folop and posted largely maskless students on social media.
Read more:“It was chaos!” Students are detained for posting photos of packed halls – now high school closes after 9 people became infected
One small study released earlier in August suggested that although children may not become as ill or symptomatic as adults, children under age can carry five to 100 times more of the virus in their nose than older children do as adults do.
‘People thought maybe [young children] can not infect, and that is not the case. They definitely get infection, “study author and pediatric infectious disease specialist Dr. Taylor Heald-Sargent told MarketWatch recently.” And once infected, they have rip-roaring amounts of virus. “
Related:Children under 5 years of age may carry a much higher viral load of coronavirus than older children and adults: study
A recent study of 47 COVID-19-infected children between the ages of 1 and 11 in Germany also found that even asymptomatic children had viral strains similar to those of adults – if not higher. And a French study found that children without symptoms appear to have COVID-19 viral loads similar to those of children with symptoms.
‘That’s what I think our paper added [to the discussion of kids and coronavirus] is this answer to whether children can be infected. They can, ”said Heald-Sargent. ‘We do not know that they are spreading it, but we must be careful. It does not mean that schools cannot open; we just need to be safe about it. ”
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