After repeated assurances from public health officials that children could not be an enormous factor in the spread of COVID-19, a new study suggests otherwise.
The study, which is a proof that is acceptable for publication, in the Journal of Pediatrics concludes that children may be a “potential source of infection” in the COVID-19 pandemic.
For the study, researchers from Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard University examined 192 children up to the age of 22. Of those, 49 tested positive for SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, and 18 more had multisystem inflammation. syndrome in children (MIS-C), a condition with a link to COVID-19 that causes various body parts to form.
The researchers found that children who were infected had a “significantly higher level” of SARS-CoV-2 in their nose and throat (also called “viral load”) than adults with a severe form of COVID- 19 were hospitalized. . With viruses, a viral load is linked to the level of risk of transmission and to how serious an illness someone can experience.
The researchers of the study warn that this could have a major impact on school drop-outs. “If schools were to reopen completely without open precautionary measures, it is likely that children would play a greater role in this pandemic,” she wrote.
This is not the first study to determine that children may have a high viral load of SARS-CoV-2. An earlier study published in JAMA Pediatrics found that children under 5 years of age host up to 100 times as much of SARS-CoV-2 in their upper respiratory tract as adults.
The more recent data may mean that “children have been silent spreaders, and more attention needs to be paid to this fact,” Drs. Richard Watkins, an infectious disease specialist in Akron, Ohio, and a professor of internal medicine at Northeast Ohio Medical University, tells Yahoo Life.
This begs an important question: Could COVID-19 spread like the flu among children? It is possible, says Dr. William Schaffner, a specialist and infectious disease and professor at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, Yahoo Life. “We are now moving to an area where flu and COVID-19 appear to be similar,” he says. “But we need even more data.”
With the flu, children have a high viral load of flu and shed “much more of the virus for extended periods of time” than adults, Schaffner says. “That’s the reason they have the distribution franchise in our population for flu,” he jokes. ‘They bring it home and distribute it to their parents, grandparents and neighbors. They are the real distribution engine of the flu virus. ”
But that has not been the case with COVID-19 – at least not until now. Many schools across the country closed when the pandemic took root in the US, but some shelters remained open. These speeches are not significant outbreaks, says Dr. Amesh Adalja, a senior scientist at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, Yahoo Life.
Recent research has shown that the viral load is present in children with COVID-19, says Adalja, “but they do not seem to be driving the epidemics.” The reason is unclear. “We still do not fully understand why children – especially those who are younger – are not linked to large clusters of infection,” he says. “That’s very different from flu.”
However, this does not mean that COVID-19 cannot spread as a flu among children. Based on the viral loads, “it appears that even if children have an asymptomatic or mildly symptomatic case of COVID-19, they may be sources of transmission,” Drs. Danelle Fisher, a pediatrician and vice president of pediatrics at Providence Saint John’s Health Center in Santa Monica, California, tells Yahoo Life. As a result, she expects to see more cases of COVID-19 in children when schools reopen. “With flu, we see cases at school where an entire class is exposed. It will end up as COVID-19 the same, ”says Fisher.
Fisher is hoping that wearing masks, social distance precautionary measures and improved cleaning measures will help reduce the spread of COVID-19 in adults and children. “As doctors, we are desperately nervous,” she says. “If you get both flu and COVID-19, that will not be fun.”
But in general, Adalja says it is important to distinguish between the ability to spread a virus like the flu like COVID-19 and actually do it. “It’s not that young children can’t spread COVID-19, it’s that they do not spread it like they do with flu at this point,” he says.
Despite all this, Schaffner points out that “we are still in the early days” to find out how easily COVID-19 infects children, and whether they have spread it as well as the flu. “How much of a distribution role do they play? That is still a question mark, ”he says. “We’re still learning.”
For the latest coronavirus news and updates, follow together to https://news.yahoo.com/coronavirus. According to experts, people over 60 and those who are immunocompromised remain the most at risk. If you have any questions, please refer to the GGD‘s and WHO’s resource guides.
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