Why Coronavirus Seems to Be Striking More Adults Than Kids

More than 8,000 people worldwide have been infected, and 171 have been killed, by a novel coronavirus that originated in Wuhan, China last month. But early research out of Wuhan suggests one group has been largely spared by the contagious disease: young children. A paper published in the New England Journal of Medicine on Thursday analyzed characteristics of 425 of the first people in Wuhan infected by the virus known as 2019-nCoV and found that none were younger than 15. The median age of patients was 59, and, at least as of mid-January, the youngest person to die from the disease was 36. Though there are not good data to show how many children have been infected as the virus spread beyond those first 425 patients, it’s certain that that number is no longer zero: a nine-month-old baby in Beijing is the youngest known patient, according to city health authorities. Even still, the early patient characteristics reported in NEJM provides clues about who the virus is, or is not, infecting. It also provides another point of comparison to fellow coronavirus severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, says Dr. Mark Denison, a pediatric infectious disease specialist at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine. SARS was “dramatically less common” among children than adults during the outbreak that began in China around 2003, and Denison says kids younger than 13 reported much less severe symptoms than older patients. It’s possible that, due to some quirk of bi...
Source: TIME: Health - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized 2019-nCoV Infectious Disease Source Type: news