Children May Carry More Coronavirus Than Adults


In an article on the The-Scientist.com website by Amanda Heidt, recent research is indicating that kids may carry a higher amount of virus in their nasopharyngeal swabs than adults do.

The article states that even though children show no symptoms of COVID-19, you can't assume that they don't have the virus. "Children under the age of five have been found to carry just as much, if not more, coronovirus in their noses and throats than older kids and adults."1 

In fact, recent results published in JAMA Pediatrics, tested 145 patients for evidence of the virus and were broken down into three age categories --- younger children ( < 5 years ), older children ( > 5 to 17), adults ( 18 to 65 ). Researchers found that the youngest group had 10 to 100 times more virus than the other two groups. 2 

Taylor Heald-Sargent, a pediatric infectious disease expert, from Ann and Robert H. Lurie Children's Hospital, first became interested in the question of how COVID-19 affects children after finding some strange results, which were counterintuitive. She found that younger children had higher virus loads but far less likely to develop symptoms. She told The New York Times that, "It definitely shows that kids do have levels of virus similar to and maybe be even higher than adults."3


These results were in line with similar small studies in other countries:
  • Germany - 47 children between the ages of one and six had the same viral loads as adults
  • France - 438 children virus levels were similar between those chidlren who had symptpms and those who didn't, which supports the idea that chidlren can be big carriers of the disease
  • South Korea - recently published a study that chidlren between 10 and 19 transmitted the disease just as frequently as adults, although children under nine were found to transmit the virus less, according to CNN. 4
According to Rick Malley, a senior pediatric physician, Boston Children's Hospital, tells NBC News that, "We don't have the evidence that children will play the same role with this virus as they do, say, with the flu virus, where it is pretty clear that kids with the flu are the main drivers of its spread." 5

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(1) https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/children-often-carry-more-coronavirus-than-adults-study-67785 
(2) Ibid. 
(3) Ibid.
(4) Ibid.
(5) Ibid.

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