How does the virus infect children? And should they be in school?

PARIS: With parents and policymakers agonising over when to reopen schools as lockdowns ease, scientists are still struggling to find out how the new coronavirus affects children. While youngsters can become infected with the new coronavirus, very few have died or contracted serious symptoms. But could they still spread contagion?Here is what we know so far.

Are children at risk?

This is one of the few questions where there is broad agreement. Only a tiny proportion of children appear to have become seriously ill with COVID-19. “There are three key questions: How much do children get COVID-19; how badly does it affect them; and do they spread it to others?” said Russell Viner, President of Britain’s Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health. “We only have good data about the second of these.

Specialists writing for the British pediatric website Don’t Forget The Bubbles (DFTB) said in a recent roundup of international research that only around one percent of critical cases involved children, while “deaths remain extremely rare”.

Do they get infected?

The short answer is yes. “Research indicates that children and adolescents are just as likely to become infected as any other age group and can spread the disease,” says the World Health Organization. But this is not reflected in global official data about the virus, with many countries largely focusing their COVID-19 testing on those who have gone to hospital with severe symptoms. France’s health agency, which has amalgamated data from a host of international studies, said pediatric cases represent between one and five percent of all officially-documented global infections. It said this is because children catch the virus, but generally exhibit only “mild” symptoms or no symptoms at all — meaning they go uncounted. But other experts believe that children, especially those under the age of 10, might not be getting infected as much in the first place. “It appears fairly convincing that children are less likely to acquire the infection than adults, by a significant amount,” said specialists Alasdair Munro and Damian Roland of DFTB.