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A total of 50 children and adolescents have been infected with the Covid-19 virus here, with approximately half of them still in hospital.
Among them is a three-year-old Singaporean girl (Case 582), who has been protected for 29 days, the longest stay of all children so far, since she tested positive for the Covid-19 virus on March 24.
She was taken into custody at KK Women’s and Children’s Hospital (KKH) after testing positive, and is linked to Cases 418 and 647, which The Straits Times understands to be the girl’s parents. Both were imported cases that had returned from the United States, and were discharged on April 9 and 6, respectively.
Of the 50 children and teens here who have been infected, eight of them are one or younger. Thirteen are between 1 and 6 years old, while 22 are between 7 and 12 years old. Seven are between 13 and 16 years old.
Five children tested positive for the virus on April 18. Four of them were related to and linked to a family member who had contracted the virus on April 13. The fifth was a one-year-old girl whose family member was infected.
Among the 50 cases to date, a one-year-old boy was the fastest to recover. He tested positive for the virus on February 16 and was discharged two days later. The boy was one of 174 passengers on the second charter Scoot flight to evacuate Singaporeans and their families from Wuhan on February 9.
Professor Dale Fisher, director of group medicine at the National University Health System and president of the World Health Organization’s Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network, said children appear to be asymptomatic or less likely. being sick with Covid-19 than adults.
With other diseases like chickenpox and hepatitis A, children also experience milder or no symptoms compared to adults, suggesting they may have a different type of immune system.
He also added that in Singapore family groups, there is no evidence that the child was the first person to contract the virus. Instead, it is usually the other way around: parents infect the child, although the child remains asymptomatic even when tested positive for the Covid-19 virus.
Dr. Sharon Nachman, director of pediatric infectious diseases at Stony Brook Children’s Hospital in New York State, told the France-Presse agency: “Children see so many illnesses in the first few years of life that their immune systems they are in tune and respond well to novels. infection. “
In a study published last month in the journal Pediatrics, researchers from the pediatric division of Jiao Tong University School of Medicine in Shanghai studied 2,143 infected children in China. They found that 50.9 percent of the children experienced mild symptoms, 38.8 percent had moderate symptoms, and 4.4 percent had no symptoms.
The remaining 5.9 percent were severe cases, well below the 18.5 percent of adults who experienced severe symptoms.
However, the study said younger children are more likely to experience severe symptoms than older children after contracting the coronavirus.
The data revealed that infected children under the age of one suffered severe or critical symptoms 10.6 percent of the time. Children one to five years old, on the other hand, experienced critical symptoms 7.3% of the time. Those over the age of 16 experienced these symptoms 3 percent of the time.
In a weekly morbidity and mortality report published by the US Centers for Disease Control. USA On April 6, it was found that, compared to adults, children under the age of 18 are less likely to experience fever, cough, or shortness of breath.
Other studies have also shown that children tend to have longer incubation and virus shedding periods compared to adults.
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