Children tend to get less severe symptoms when they contract novel coronavirus Covid-19 and cases can be harder to detect than in adults, new research in China has found, as health experts, parents and officials weigh the risks of sending their kids to school, South China Morning Post reports.
Detailed analysis of 36 pediatric cases in China’s Zhejiang province found that the pandemic-causing coronavirus had little effect on their upper airways.
Fever, cough and pneumonia were the most common symptoms, about half the children had mild disease with no obvious signs - amounting to a “covert presentation,” researchers said Wednesday in the Lancet Infectious Diseases journal.
Although small in scope, the study from China, where the virus originated, may be the most comprehensive analysis yet of pediatric patients with Covid-19, according to the authors.
The findings suggest that infected children showing no clinical signs of disease are both difficult, and important, to find and isolate to stop the pandemic spreading.
Separate research published this month in The New England Journal of Medicine had similar results.
It found that of 171 children who contracted in Wuhan, where it was first reported in December, 27 – or 15.8% – were asymptomatic. Another 12 showed features of pneumonia in their medical scans, but not symptoms of infection.
“The large proportion of asymptomatic children indicates the difficulty in identifying paediatric patients who do not have clear epidemiological information, leading to a dangerous situation in community-acquired infections,” the researchers in the Zhejiang study said.
Older age is one of the biggest risk factors for developing a severe form of Covid-19. While some children are reported to have become critically ill, the risk of death among patients younger than 16 is extremely low, raising questions about the anatomy and immune system of children that helps them avoid the coronavirus’s potentially lethal effects.
However, a US infant has died from the Covid-19 illness, officials in the state of Illinois said on Saturday, marking an extremely rare case of juvenile death in the global pandemic.
At a news conference, Governor JB Pritzker said "an infant" was among the fatalities linked to the new coronavirus over the previous 24 hours.
The state Department of Public Health said the child who died in Chicago was younger than one year old and had tested positive for Covid-19.
