What's known and not known about the impact of the panedemic on children

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Fri, 2020-07-24 20:59 — mike kraft

Here's what COVID-19 does to a child's body As schools prepare to reopen, experts weigh in on whether youth protects against the virus, and how readily kids can spread it to adults. Science

Since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, children have been largely spared the worst health impacts of COVID-19. The same SARS-CoV-2 virus capable of killing a 50-year-old might leave a four-year-old unscathed....

“Children are suffering in different ways from adults,” says Megan Tschudy, a pediatrician at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

However, scientists are still struggling to understand how the virus affects children and whether kids can spread it to their older caregivers. Overall, scientists don’t fully understand why multiple kinds of coronaviruses—including COVID-19 and its viral cousins SARS and MERS—have different levels of severity across age ranges, says Rachel Graham, an epidemiologist at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill.

Graham, who first spoke with National Geographic in March about COVID-19’s effects on children, says our understanding of why the virus seems to go easy on kids has not fundamentally advanced since then. Even with increased testing showing that more kids are capable of contracting the virus than we previously thought, experts can only theorize as to why children are largely spared the intense version of COVID-19 that strikes so many adults.

It’s also unclear how easily kids can spread the virus, both to each other and to adults. One robust study of nearly 65,000 kids published by the South Korean Center for Disease Control last week showed that children in the 10- to 19-year-old age range could spread COVID-19 within households just as effectively as adults.

According to the CDC, only 2 percent of domestic COVID-19 cases have occurred in children under 18, but data collected by Bloomberg show those rates can vary greatly by region. So far, 20 children under age five in the U.S. have died from COVID-19.

A small percentage of minors who test positive for COVID-19 develop a life-threatening condition called multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children (MIS-C), and it’s unclear if the disease has other long-term consequences....

A large study is now underway in the United States to understand how COVID-19 infects children, even as parents and pediatricians are grappling with an upcoming school year scheduled to begin while infection rates continue rising.