Children Spread COVID-19 More Than Adults, Report Urges Schools To Stay Closed

Even though kids are happy staying and studying from home amidst the COVID-19 lockdown parents are waiting for the day the schools would reopen.

However, this new study surely highlights why there is still time for schools to be deemed safe for the little ones.

Reuters

The study was trying to understand the impact of COVID-19 on kids below the age of five years. They looked at kids who showed mild to moderate symptoms of COVID-19, however along this road, they discovered that they actually contained higher concentrations of the novel coronavirus than kids of older age, teens and even adults.

Conducted by researchers from Northwestern University and a Chicago pediatric hospital, the study published in JAMA Pediatrics surely puts an asterisk on parents and educators who were gearing up for the opening of schools and daycare centres.

The study doesn¡¯t really test the rate of COVID-19 transmission in children, but they do look at the possibility that kids could be more, if not, at a similar risk of transmitting SARS CoV-2 than adults. It is important to note, however, that a major chunk of kids in the study had comparably milder symptoms.

They used clinical data collected from 145 COVID-19 patients with mild to moderate symptoms that only started showing the symptoms over the previous week. The sample was split into three categories -- children under five, children between five and eighteen years, and adults from 18 to 65 years.

This sample, however, didn¡¯t include severe patients, asymptomatic patients as well as patients who didn¡¯t have any symptoms for a week.

Kids below 5 years have high COVID-19 load

The nasal swabs of kids below the age of five were considerably more concentrated than older kids and adults. In fact, some kids had higher concentration levels who weren¡¯t even that ill.

Taylor Heald-Sargent, the lead author and a pediatric infectious diseases specialist at Lurie Children's Hospital of Chicago and assistant professor of paediatrics at Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine said "We found that children under 5 with COVID-19 have a higher viral load than older children and adults, which may suggest greater transmission, as we see with respiratory syncytial virus, also known as RSV. This has important public health implications, especially during discussions on the safety of reopening schools and daycare."

Reuters

When will school reopen?

Researchers claim that there is still much to be learnt about the infection, its transmission and how the immune system responds. However, now is probably not the right time to let the kids out.

Taylor said in a statement to Fortune, "One of the things that¡¯s come up in the whole school reopening discussion is: since kids are less sick, is it because they have less of the virus? And our data does not support that. We can't assume that kids aren't able to spread the virus."