How COVID-19 Affects Children

to a person's underlying health conditions. While the immune system is fighting the virus, it could also be exacerbating these underlying health factors. Megan Ulteney, staff writer at Wired, joins us for why COVID nineteen isn't affecting kids the same way as others. Thanks for joining us, Megan, Thanks for having me. We're still trying to learn more about COVID nineteen,

the coronavirus, and how people get affected by it. Right now, a single contagious person can affect about two point two others. On average. Globally, three point four percent of reported COVID patients have died. These numbers are all subject to change as we get more infections and we get to drill down a little bit more on what's happening. But one of the big questions that has been because we've seen the debts, and we've seen the severe cases, mostly in

older adults, mostly having underlying health conditions. But the big question is where have all the kids gone? Like, what's happening to children that are being infected with the virus. Because usually when there's some type of respiratory disease something like that, it tends to affect young kids and older people. So we're trying to figure out exactly why there haven't been that many severe cases and children Megan. There's a few studies that have come out about this. Now what

do we know? Yeah, so you know, there have been some recent analyzes um looking at cases coming out of China that have indicated that children under the age of ten account for less than one percent of all infections. According to the World Health Organization, their data shows that about two point four percent of reported cases in China were children under the age of ten, So those are still you know, if it's somewhere between one and two

point four percent, it's still a pretty small case. And if we look at you know, cases of where children got critically ill, that's happening even less like point two percent of the time. China has yet to report any instances of a young child dying of the disease caused by this you know, new novel coronavirus. So for the last you know number of weeks, as UM you know, these cases have passed a hundred thousand globally, we're just

seeing very few kids, um in the case numbers. The interesting thing is that children are not necessarily not being infected. They are being diagnosed with COVID nineteen. They're just not

getting as sick as some older people. Yeah, So for the last few weeks there's kind of been this question of, you know, our kids not getting infected and that's why we're seeing the low case numbers, or do they just have much more mild response to the virus and so they're not showing up because they're not you know, presenting symptoms that would um, you know, allow them to get diagnosed. And so a new study came out um last week.

It was published to a preprint server, and instead of just looking at case data, it actually looked at contact tracing. So this is the process by which health officials will go out and find people who have been exposed to patients of COVID nineteen and then track all of those people and monitor them and see if they get sick

or not. And so that starts to build a more detailed picture of something called the attack rates, So how often the virus actually spreads into people of different age groups when they've kind of been exposed to the same

number of infected people. And so looking at that data, which was actually collected by the Chinese c d C in Shenzen Province, which about seven hundred miles to the south of where the kind of epicenter of the outbreak was in Hube, they were able to identify about four hundred patients and about twelve people who've been in close contact. And when they looked at that data, what they found was that the virus basically appears to infect children at

the same rates that they infect adults. So between seven and eight percent of the time that someone is exposed to an infected person, say themselves would get the disease, and that was true whether that person was in their sixties or that person was under the age of ten. This is the first time we're seeing data AMERGE that suggests that in fact can get the disease just as much as if anyone else can. It's just that they appear to have much milder symptoms than adults, and particularly

people in the kind of elderly age coort. So then that leads us to believe underlying health conditions seemed to be a key factor in the severity of COVID nineteen. When you know it starts going crazing their bodies, also

their immune system the response. So the immune system seems to be a double edged sword because it's trying to fight the virus, but it's also fighting the body itself, damaging healthy tissues sometimes and other people are said, going back to the children, they don't have a lot of these underlying health conditions. Their lungs haven't been as going through years and years of inflammation, and these little things

could be helping children have these milder symptoms. So at this point these are hypotheses because we don't have the kind of experimental data that we would need to prove these out. I'm sure those studies will be coming, but what you've talked about relies on some older research on

a related coronavirus, the coronavirus that causes stars. There was an outbreak of that in two thousand two and two thousand three in China, and so scientists who over the last decade or so have been studying stars in the lab. What they have seen is that as mice get older and older, they have worse and worse symptoms and worse

and worse outcomes um with stars. And because of the way that stars um, it has what's called kind of a biphasic pattern where you kind of have this big surge of symptoms right after infection when the virus is replicating heavily in the lungs, and so you get that fever, you get that cough, and then it dies down as

the immune system kicks in. And then for patients who experience the worst symptoms, patients who often died, they kind of saw an uptick in symptoms that this time they researchers believe was not being caused by the virus itself, but by an immune system that had turned on and was kind of an overdrive and not able to turn

itself off. And so their data from epidemiological studies of STARS patients as well as UM lab animals that have been infected with stars, has kind of built up this body of evidence that suggests that the immune response is as important in determining how severe someone's symptoms are with the stars coronaviruses as the virus itself, and so we have reason to believe that this new virus that causes COVID nineteen may um, you know, may provoke a similar

a similar set of circumstances in patients. And so that's why we're seeing the higher mortality rates and higher set of severe symptoms and older patients. It's super important to understand why this is happening, why children aren't getting affected as seriously as some others, because when it comes down to public health officials being confronted with these choices, you know, we keep hearing a lot about social distancing and closing down concerts and all this other stuff, closing schools down.

Even children are being infected at similar rates as normal adults, but they're not showing the symptoms. So it's kind of an interesting thing, you know, do you shut down more schools? Do you keep kids out of bigger areas just because they might have it but not be showing the same amount of symptoms as So it's important to understand what's going on here to some extent. It's still a little bit of an open in question just to what extent

kids are involved in what's called onward transmission. So we don't really know right now the extent to which kids who are maybe experiencing mild symptoms are going out and spreading the virus further. You know, if they're not having a bad cough, then they may not be shedding large amounts of virus on other people. So that's a place where ongoing research is going to be required to understand just how much kids are playing a role in spreading

this disease. Now that we know that kids can get infected with it at the same rates as adults, that would suggest that, you know, closing schools is perhaps a more relevant strategy than if kids weren't getting infected in the first place. But still don't understand exactly what some of the transmission dynamics are, and so I think the probably cautious approach would be to act as though they are,

you know, vectors of diseases transmission. But like we said, that's not something we know for sure at this point. Megan Multeney, staff writer at Wired, Thank you very much for joining us. Yeah, thank you very much for having me. This has been your daily coronavirus update. Don't forget that. For today's big news stories, you can catch me on the Daily Dive podcast every Monday through Friday, so follow us on I Heart radio or wherever you get your podcast