The vulnerability of children to Corona turns into a puzzle for...

And at the beginning of the emergence The epidemicBy analogy with other viral diseases such as influenza, children were feared to be among the main carriers of infection. Then it turned to the opposite thinking after studies indicated that they were not very contagious.

“If we look at the data contained in the research papers, we will find that the matter is not clear,” said epidemiologist Dominic Costagliola, in a statement to Agence France-Presse.

And epidemiologist Zoe Hyde, in an article published in the Australian Medical Journal, estimated that many studies report that: children Slightly transmit the infection to their family.

Then she added that these studies were “conducted during isolation periods”, that is, in a period when there is transmission Virus Weak, and this would affect the results of the conclusions that were reached.

Researchers doubts

Researchers questioned studies conducted in the United States, India or South Korea, and then said that children rarely transmit infection.

The last of these studies was published on October 30th, by the US Centers for Disease Prevention and Prevention.

The study included 300 people, and ultimately concluded that the transmission of the “SARS-Cove-2” virus within the family “was frequent, whether by children or adults.”

However, a large-scale UK study published on Tuesday painted a completely different picture.

Based on data from 9 million adults, researchers from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and the University of Oxford estimate that “living with children between the ages of 0 and 11 is not associated with an increased risk of contracting the emerging coronavirus. This risk increases slightly when living with a child aged between 0 and 11 years. 12 and 18 years old.

So it is difficult to get an answer amidst so many contradictory observations.

WHO specialist Maria Van Kerkhove summarizes in a video dedicated to this question on the organization’s website that children “can transmit Covid-19 to others. However, it appears that its transmission through them is often less than its transmission between adults.”

The epidemiologist stresses the need to distinguish between “young children and adolescents, who appear to transmit infection in the same proportions as adults.”

For his part, the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control says in a report published in August that “when they show symptoms, children excrete the same amount of virus as adults and are as infectious as them. We do not know to what extent children who do not show symptoms can infect others.”

The absence of symptoms is common in children with Covid-19 and the only thing we have for sure is that they develop symptoms that are much less severe than adults.