9/23/2023 0 Comments Covid symptoms in kids under 10One theory, as WIRED previously reported, is that kids haven’t been exposed to as much pollution and chronic inflammation as adults, making their young lungs more robust against coronavirus attacks. What continues to puzzle infectious disease doctors like Creech is why so many children seem to survive Covid-19 relatively unscathed-following the same pattern exhibited during other deadly coronaviruses outbreaks, including SARS and MERS. “Kids can still get severe disease from this coronavirus, particularly if there are other risk factors, including heart disease and lung conditions,” he says. Read all of our coronavirus coverage here.įrom these latest reports, one of the main takeaways is that while children are still overall less prone to serious Covid-19 infections than adults, the risk to individual kids runs on a spectrum, says Buddy Creech, an infectious disease pediatrician at the Vanderbilt University Medical Center, who was not involved in either study. Of those severe cases, 13 rapidly progressed to “critical” condition, experiencing life-threatening respiratory distress and organ failure. But 125 children had enough trouble breathing that their bodies were no longer moving sufficient oxygen to their organs. Ninety-four kids, representing just over 4 percent of cases, had no symptoms at all. More than a third became moderately ill, with evidence of pneumonia and other lung issues on top of the chills and sniffles. In the first retrospective analysis of these cases, a team of Chinese epidemiologists led by the Shanghai Children’s Medical Center found that about half of the children experienced only mild symptoms-fever, cough, runny nose, sometimes nausea and diarrhea. Most lived in Hubei province, the original epicenter of the outbreak. Both of the studies showed that infected kids present a range of symptoms-from none at all in some cases, to a mild cough, to severe lung failure, and in two cases, death.īetween January 16 and February 8, the Chinese CDC identified 2,143 children under the age of 18 who had either received a confirmed Covid-19 diagnosis via laboratory testing or were presumed to have the disease based on their symptoms and history of exposure. When these researchers looked at more cases, they found more to be concerned about. Last week, the picture got more complicated as scientists published two much larger studies of pediatric Covid-19 patients in China. The March 4 study was limited by sample size-only 20 patients under the age of 10. Kids with preexisting medical conditions are also more vulnerable. But now researchers are learning that the initial good news may come with an important caveat: Babies and toddlers appear to be at higher risk of developing severe symptoms than school-age kids. Then they called their own parents to convince them to take this coronavirus thing seriously. Parents everywhere breathed a sigh of relief. As Justin Lessler, a Johns Hopkins infectious disease epidemiologist who co-led the study told WIRED at the time, “Kids are just as likely to get infected as adults.” But he and his collaborators didn’t see any kids who were getting very sick. They found that it does not, as they reported in a preprint. The study, released on March 4 by researchers at the Harbin Institute of Technology in Shenzhen and Johns Hopkins University, used Chinese CDC data on about 1,200 people exposed to Covid-19 patients to determine if the virus infected different age groups at different rates. Earlier this month, an analysis of data collected by the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention found that children do in fact contract the virus as often as adults, but they tend to have milder symptoms.
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