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When and how long should you stay out of school or kindergarten? At a press conference in Vienna on Tuesday, pediatricians urged consistent action under the slogan of containment (containment) rather than closure and recommended: “Sick children stay home.”
A runny nose without fever, for example, doesn’t mean you’re sick, it was emphasized. The Austrian Society for Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine (ÖGKJ) also recommends keeping infection rates generally low and not just paying attention to corona symptoms. Children also tend to have different tendencies than adults: gastrointestinal and skin problems, in particular, occur in the very young.
However, not a single child has died from the corona virus in Austria so far. Of the roughly 35,000 people who have tested positive to date, about 500 were under the age of five (1.4 percent), 1,600 or 4.6 percent between the ages of five and 14. From the beginning, children were shown to have a special position: More and more studies indicate that they not only develop symptoms less often, but also become infected less often, she said. Chains of infection generally come from adults and children are less likely to transmit the infection. SARS-CoV-2 cases do not appear to occur disproportionately in schools and daycare centers.
Children are not at great risk of corona transmission
Volker Strenger, head of the ÖGKJ’s “Infectiology” group, pointed out that it had turned out to be a false assumption that children play an above-average role in transmission. Rather, cluster analyzes, even in schools, would have shown that they are less common index cases and less likely to infect other people than adult index cases. At the start of school holidays, 3.7 percent of all infected children who had tested positive so far were children under 14 years of age. When school started, this ratio had increased to six percent. The number of childhood infections detected grew disproportionately by 165 percent.
By consistently following the principle of containment rather than blocking, the offspring can be made to go through not the usual five to ten infections per season this year, but only one or two. “The most effective method to prevent the spread of the virus is containment,” emphasized Reinhold Kerbl, head of the department for children and adolescents at LKH Hochsteiermark / Leoben. Therefore, infected people should be separated or isolated as much as possible to prevent further spread. Therefore, the ÖGKJ appealed to parents and families to do their part to contain all viruses.
(SERVICE – The Austrian Society for Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine (ÖGKJ) can be found at https://www.paediatrie.at/)
