Coronavirus: Children are less likely to catch deadly infection that's killed over 500 already, new study
The novel coronavirus, which first emerged in Wuhan in December 2019, has claimed over 500 lives and infected more than 24,000 in China alone. Scientists across the world are striving to find a cure for the virus as new details of its symptoms emerge. However, one of the biggest mysteries for them is to determine why very few children have been infected with the deadly virus.
Children might be less likely to get infected or, if infected, may show milder symptoms than adults, a study in the New England Journal of Medicine stated.
Reports state that no children younger than the age of 15 have been diagnosed with the new coronavirus as of January 22.
Doctors, since then, have recorded a few cases among children, including a nine-month-old girl in Beijing, a child in Germany whose father was diagnosed with the virus first, and a child in Shenzhen, China, who was infected but displayed no symptoms. Chinese officials on February 5 confirmed that an infant has been tested positive for the virus 30 hours after being born in Wuhan. The mother of the baby is a coronavirus patient.
Although there are a few cases of infections in children, they do not, however, appear to be vulnerable to the virus. “The median age of patients is between 49 and 56,” according to a report published on Wednesday in JAMA. “Cases in children have been rare.”
Richard Martinello, an associate professor of infectious disease at the Yale School of Medicine, told Business Insider, "From everything that we've seen, and for reasons that are unclear to us, it does seem that this is primarily impacting adults. Some of the reports that have come out so far from China have been from adult hospitals and not pediatric hospitals, so it could just be that we're not seeing that data yet."
Some experts have tried to explain this phenomenon by theorizing that children are getting infected, but they get the milder cases of the disease, which is generally not reported.
Chief of Virology at the University of Hong Kong, Dr Malik Peiris, who has developed a diagnostic test for the new coronavirus, told the New York Times, "My strong, educated guess is that younger people are getting infected, but they get the relatively milder disease." And the scientists may be seeing more infections among children because "we don’t have data on the milder cases."