The news of the infection of a newborn in China with the Corona virus, on February 5, just 30 hours after his birth, spread quickly around the world.
This was the smallest case recorded, so far, since the outbreak that killed more than 900 patients and infected more than 40,000 people, mostly in China (although cases have been recorded in more than 30 other countries).
But very few of these injuries were among the children.
The most recent epidemiological study, published by the Journal of the American Medical Association, included an audit of hospitalized patients at Jinitan Hospital in Wuhan, the city that is the epicenter.
The study found that the ages of more than half of those infected with the virus ranged between 40 and 59 years, and that only 10 percent of those infected were under the age of thirty-nine.
The researchers concluded that “injuries among children were rare.”
Low incidence in children :
There are many theories trying to explain this phenomenon, but experts in the field of public health have not yet been able to explain why there are few injuries among children.
“For reasons that are not precisely clear to us, it appears that the children either avoided the infection completely, or their injuries are not severe,” Ian Jones, a professor of virology at Reading University of English, told BBC.
This may mean that children develop a lighter form of the disease, so that they do not show any symptoms, which ultimately leads to their parents avoiding going to doctors or hospitals, and thus not recording their injuries.
This view is shared by a lecturer at University College London, Natalie McDermott, who says “Children above 5 years old and teenagers have immune systems that can fight viruses. They may become infected, but the disease will have lighter or no symptoms at all.” .
This is not unique to the current prevalence of the Corona virus in China. There are precedents. In the spread of SARS, which was also caused by a Corona virus, in China in 2003, it killed nearly 800 people (10 percent of the 8,000 cases). The incidence among children was also low.
In 2007, the US Epidemic Control Center announced that 135 children were infected with the SARS virus, “but no deaths have been reported between children and adolescents.
Does the virus cause more severe symptoms in adults than children?
Despite the small number of children confirmed to be infected with the virus, experts do not believe that this is due to the fact that they have not been infected. The most likely explanation is that the current epidemic is an addition to diseases that afflict adults more severely than children, such as chickenpox, for example.
“This is more likely than saying that children have some immunity to the Corona virus,” Andrew Andrew Freeman, an infectious disease expert at Cardiff University in Wales, told the BBC. “It may also be because the authorities are not monitoring cases of asymptomatic children.” Or those who show only mild symptoms. “
The Epidemiologist, a statistician at the University of Oxford and Imperial in London, agrees with this suggestion, pointing to evidence from the spread of the SARS epidemic in Hong Kong that “our colleagues’ conclusion indicates that disease is not a dangerous trend in children, And so they were less affected (than adults). “
Source: BBC News
