Why Children Seem to Be Less Affected By the Coronavirus

If there was one glimmer of hope among the alarming number of cases of COVID-19 in the past few months, it was that young children seemed to avoid more serious illness. That trend, which doctors in China first reported, seems to be holding true in the US as well. In the latest Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report report released today by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), scientists say that compared to adults, children under the age of 18 are less likely to experience the typical symptoms of infection, including fever, cough and difficulty breathing, and are also less likely to need hospitalization and less likely to die of COVID-19. That’s an unusual bit of good news for a respiratory disease, since viruses like influenza often strike the very young and the very old more aggressively, given their more vulnerable immune systems. “I can’t think of another situation in which a respiratory infection only affects adults so severely,” says Dr. Yvonne Maldonado, professor of pediatrics at Stanford University School of Medicine and chair of the committee on infectious diseases at the American Academy of Pediatrics. “This is not common at all; we just don’t know what is going on here.” “The fact is that we are not seeing preponderance of severe [COVID-19] disease in young children, which is distinct from influenza,” says Dr. Kristin Moffitt, an assistant professor pediatrics at Harvard Medical School and a pediatric infecti...
Source: TIME: Health - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized COVID-19 Source Type: news