Citat:
Children and Coronavirus: Research Finds Some Become Seriously Ill
A study of more than 2,000 children with the virus in China found that babies were especially vulnerable to developing severe infection.
The coronavirus raging around the globe has tended to tread gently with children, who account for the smallest percentage of the tens of thousands of infections identified so far.
Now, the largest study to date of children and the virus has found that while most develop mild or moderate symptoms, a small percentage — especially babies and preschoolers — can become seriously ill.
The study, published online in the journal Pediatrics, looked at more than 2,000 ill children across China, where the pandemic began. It provides a clearer portrait of how the youngest patients are affected by the virus, knowledge that experts say can help influence policies like school closures, hospital preparedness and the deployment of an eventual treatment and vaccine.
The researchers analyzed 2,143 cases of children under 18 that were reported to the Chinese Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as of Feb. 8. Just over a third of those cases were confirmed with laboratory testing. The rest were classified as suspected cases based on the child’s symptoms, chest X-rays, blood tests and whether the child had been exposed to people with coronavirus.
About half of the children had mild symptoms, such as fever, fatigue, cough, congestion and possibly nausea or diarrhea. More than a third — about 39 percent — became moderately sick, with additional symptoms including pneumonia or lung problems revealed by CT scan, but with no obvious shortness of breath. About 4 percent had no symptoms at all.
But there were 125 children — nearly 6 percent— who developed very serious illness, and one 14-year-old boy with confirmed coronavirus infection died, said Shilu Tong, the study’s senior author, who is director of the department of clinical epidemiology and biostatistics at Shanghai Children’s Medical Center. Thirteen of those were considered “critical," on the brink of respiratory or organ failure. The others were classified as “severe” because they had dire respiratory problems.
“Effectively, what this tells us is that hospitals should prepare for some pediatric patients because we can’t rule out children altogether,” said Dr. Srinivas Murthy, an associate professor of pediatrics at the University of British Columbia, who was not involved in the study.
“The main conclusion,” Dr. Murthy continued, “is that children are infected at rates that may be comparable to adults, with severity that’s much less, but that even within the kids, there’s a spectrum of illness and there’s a handful that require more aggressive therapy.”
More than 60 percent of the 125 children who became severely ill or critically ill were age 5 or younger, the study reported. Forty of those were infants, under 12 months old.
Dr. Tong said he believed that younger children were more susceptible to infection because their respiratory systems and other body functions are rapidly developing.
Dr. Andrea Cruz, an associate professor of pediatrics of Baylor College of Medicine and co-author of a commentary about the study, said that preschoolers and babies likely get sicker because of their “immune system immaturity.”
“They haven’t been exposed to viruses before and therefore they can’t mount an effective immune response,” she said in an interview.
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