Why Do Infants Seem to Avoid Severe COVID-19?

With COVID-19 rates rising around the country, and an updated vaccine now available, researchers are still trying to understand how immunity to COVID-19 works, and the best ways to build and sustain it. One of the possibly richest areas of research might be infections among the very young, who tend to be spared from more serious COVID-19 disease. Hospitalization rates for infants four years old or under dropped to under 1 per 100,000 earlier this year, and have recently inched up slightly to 2 per 100,000 in the middle of September, compared to rates for people over 65 years old, which hit a low of 6 per 100,000 earlier this year and climbed up to 17.6 in September. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] In a study published recently in the journal Cell, researchers led by Bali Pulendran, a professor of pathology, microbiology, and immunology at Stanford University School of Medicine, report some key differences in how infants and adults experience COVID-19 infections, which could lead to new ways of generating stronger and more durable immunity in the future. Read more: Most Kids Do Not Get Severe COVID-19, Large Study Confirms Pulendran and his team took advantage of samples collected from children at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital in 2020, before COVID-19 vaccines were available. Doctors took weekly nasal samples from the infants, who ranged in age from one month to nearly four years old, and some developed COVID-19 infections, so the researchers c...
Source: TIME: Health - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized COVID-19 healthscienceclimate Source Type: news