Eager for schools to reopen and return to the old ‘normal’, President Trump has stated in his opinion that children are “virtually immune” or “almost immune” to coronavirus infection.
That’s false. A new report from the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Children’s Hospital Association found that at least 97,000 children in the US tested positive for the coronavirus in the last two weeks of July, with at least 338,000 American children attending positive testing since the pandemic began. In line with their policy of misleading claims about COVID-19, Facebook and Twitter have removed Trump’s posts on the subject.
Meanwhile, as summer winds subside, schools that began reopening are already seeing COVID-19 upgrades among students and staff. Yahoo News Medical Officer Dr. Dara Kass explains that the rise in cases among children, a change from the beginning of the pandemic, is largely due to more adults being exposed to summer camps and starting schools as person classes again. Children are certainly not immune to the disease, she says.
“I think it’s important to come to a common definition of the term immunity, because it relates to children and the coronavirus,” says Kass. ‘Immune means that if they were exposed to the virus, their bodies would fight it without any chance that they would become infected. We know one hundred percent that is definitely false. There is nothing inherent in children which means that every time they are exposed to the virus, there is zero percent chance that they will be infected or that this coronavirus will spread.
While most children with reported cases of COVID-19 are believed to be asymptomatic when having mild symptoms, with a low hospitalization rate compared to adults, this does not mean that children are insufficient for complications of the virus. The CDC says children are still “at risk for severe COVID-19,” according to a Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report released last week by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. One-third of admissions to pediatric hospitals for COVID-19 were to intensive care units – equal to the proportion among adults.
“Some people may think that only children with immunocompromised conditions or other medical problems will be affected by this virus,” says Kass. “We have seen that several children without medical problems and unforeseen circumstances are in the hospital, have to go to the ICU and unfortunately die from this coronavirus.”
There is still a lot to learn about the effects of COVID-19 on children. A recent study found that children under 5 had between 10 and 100 times more viral genetic material in their noses than older children and adults. Although the study does not measure transmissibility, these findings reveal the possibility that very young children may have spread coronavirus. And another study from South Korea found that teens, between the ages of 10 and 19, can spread the virus at least as much as adults do.
“Our information on how children both contract and transmit the coronavirus is early and incomplete at best,” says Kass. ‘What we do know is that when children go to school and are adults and other children, they still have to wear masks, they still have to be at a distance, and we still have to make sure that the viral prevalence in their communities is low enough that the whole community is at lower risk. ”
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