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How often do children become infected with the coronavirus or transmit the pathogen? That is one of the big questions of this pandemic. While restaurants and leisure facilities in Germany will close in the coming weeks and as many employees as possible will return to work from home, kindergartens and schools will remain open. “The right to education for children and adolescents can best be realized in face-to-face lessons,” reads a joint decision of the 16 education ministers, which was published the day before the next closure decision.
It is known that children are not completely immune to contracting the coronavirus. We also know that in the vast majority of cases they will survive infection very well. However, the frequency with which they transmit the virus remains difficult to quantify. Because: Different studies reach different results.
A current study from Bavaria may at least show how often children and youth in the state have been infected with Sars-CoV-2 in recent months. According to the study, six times as many children were infected with the coronavirus than is officially known.
Almost 12,000 blood samples examined
Between January and July, the team at the Helmholtz Center in Munich analyzed almost 12,000 blood samples from children and adolescents between the ages of 1 and 18. The blood samples came from participants in the Fr1da study, which observed the development of type 1 diabetes. The number of boys and girls in the study was about the same. The participants are considered to be representative of Bavarian children and youth.
Scientists use a two-stage antibody test to rule out false-positive results where possible. The team writes that the specificity of the procedure is 100 percent, so anyone who does not have antibodies to Sars-CoV-2 because they have not yet been infected will receive the correct (negative) test result. The so-called sensitivity is more than 95 percent, which means that the test does not start in less than five percent of those examined who had a coronavirus infection.
The researchers were able to show that the test did not produce any false positive results with the help of almost 4,000 more blood samples from 2019, which were taken before the spread of Sars-CoV-2.
According to the study, only 0.08 percent of samples taken from January to March contained antibodies from a previous Sars-CoV-2 infection. However, between April and July, an average of 0.87 percent of the samples were positive.
Compared with cases reported in Bavaria in young people up to 18 years of age, the frequency of antibodies was about six times higher, reports the Helmholtz Center. According to official data, around 0.16 percent of children and adolescents in Bavaria had a coronavirus infection.
About half of the children and adolescents who tested positive for coronavirus antibodies in the study did not have corresponding symptoms of the disease, that is, an asymptomatic course.
The number of unreported cases the study uncovered doesn’t have to come as a surprise: According to several studies from different countries, adults also had up to ten times more Sars-CoV-2 infections than were officially diagnosed and reported, according to the job.
The study also shows: Almost two-thirds of children and adolescents in whom a family member had a proven infection tested negative for antibodies, they were not infected. However, the fact that about a third of the children in the family may have been infected indicates a higher transmission rate than previously described, write researchers Markus Hippich and Anette-G. Bricks from the Helmholtz Center.
