Are Children Less Likely To Get Coronavirus? Here's What We Know
When officials from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said this week that it is likely not a matter of if but when the new coronavirus spreads in the United States, my first thought was of my own little germ factories: my kids. One is in school, the other is in nursery. One or both of them has been sniffling — or worse — since September. I worry about what an outbreak here could portend for them.
Also concerned? Here’s what we know so far — and what parents should keep in mind when it comes to keeping their kids healthy.
There’s no evidence that kids are more susceptible to the virus.
First, an important note: There is a lot that is unclear at this point.
“We don’t know why kids seem to be not in the news,” Dr. Aaron Milstone, an epidemiologist and professor of paediatrics at Johns Hopkins Medicine, told HuffPost. “The news we’re getting is filtered, and all we know is what we hear.”
Kids come down with respiratory viruses often. Experts say that it is not unusual for a healthy child who goes to school or nursery to come down with up to 10 a season — partly because they’re just around a lot of other children and partly because they tend to be a bit more lax about things like keeping their hands to themselves or washing them. Or not sneezing on friends. Also, their little immune systems are still developing.
Right now, however, there is no evidence that kids are any more likely than adults to come down with this particular coronavirus, the CDC says. And the agency stresses that the majority of confirmed cases in China were in adults. Also notable: The largest study we have so far on the outbreak of this coronavirus, dubbed COVID-19, which looked at more than 44,000 cases in China, found no deaths among children younger than 9.
There is some evidence that kids have milder symptoms.
The limited information we do have on children affected with the virus in China suggests that those with confirmed cases had relatively...
