Children can also be Coronavirus super-spreaders. Some precautions to take against the pandemic – Zoë Hyde, epidemiologist, University of Western Australia The role children, and consequently schools, play in the Covid-19 pandemic has been hard to work out, but that puzzle is now finally starting to be solved. The latest research shows infections in children frequently go undetected, and that children are just as susceptible as adults to infection. Children likely transmit the virus at a similar rate to adults as well. While children are thankfully much less likely than adults to get seriously ill, the same isn’t true for the adults that care for them. Evidence suggests schools have been a driver of the second wave in Europe and elsewhere. This means the safety of schools needs an urgent rethink. It’s hard to detect COVID-19 in children Infections with SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, in children are generally much more mild than in adults and easy to overlook. A study from South Korea found the majority of children had symptoms mild enough to go unrecognised, and only 9 percent were diagnosed at the time of symptom onset. Researchers used an antibody test (which can detect if a person had the virus previously and recovered) to screen a representative sample of nearly 12,000 children from the general population in Germany. They found the majority of cases in children had been missed. In itself, that’s not surprising, because many cases in adults are missed, too. But what made this study important, was that it showed young and older children were likely to have been similarly infected. Official testing in Germany had suggested young children were much less likely to be infected than teenagers, but this wasn’t true. Younger children with infections just weren’t getting tested. The study also found nearly half of infected children were asymptomatic. This is about twice what’s typically seen in adults. But children do transmit the virus We’ve known for a while that around the same amount of viral genetic material can be found in the nose and throat of both children and adults. But that doesn’t necessarily mean children will transmit the same way adults do. Because children have smaller lung capacity and are less likely to exhibit symptoms, they might release less virus into the environment. However, a new study conducted by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) found children and adults were similarly likely to transmit the virus to their household contacts. Another study, of more than 84,000 cases and their close contacts in India found children and young adults are especially likely to transmit the virus. Most of the children in these studies likely had symptoms. So, it’s unclear if asymptomatic children transmit the virus in the same way. But outbreaks in childcare centres have shown transmission by children who don’t show symptoms still occurs. During an outbreak at two childcare centres in Utah, asymptomatic children transmitted the virus to their family members, which resulted in the hospitalisation of…
