Most Kids Do Not Get Severe COVID-19, Large Study Confirms
A large European study confirms a rare bit of good news about COVID-19: children seem to be mostly spared from the worst of its effects.
The paper, published June 25 in the Lancet Child & Adolescent Health, suggests well fewer than 1% of children who develop COVID-19 will go on to die from it, and the vast majority will not need intensive care. By contrast, in some of the world’s hardest-hit countries, case fatality ratios that include adults are estimated (albeit using preliminary data) to be higher than 10%.
The new study analyzed case data from almost 600 pediatric COVID-19 patients from 21 different European countries. The kids ranged in age from three days to 18 years old, and boys made up just over half of the group. Three-quarters of the children had no preexisting medical conditions.
More than half of the children were admitted to a hospital, but only 8% required intensive care, the researchers found. Only four patients died from their disease. That works out to a case fatality rate of 0.69%.
Across entire populations, the actual rate is probably much lower, the researchers write, since many children infected with COVID-19 have such mild cases they never require medical care in the first place, let alone need to be admitted to a hospital. For example, 16% of kids in the study never showed COVID-19 symptoms; many of them were only tested because they’d had close contact with another infected person.
The researchers found that infants younger than one m...
Source: TIME: Health - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Jamie Ducharme Tags: Uncategorized COVID-19 Source Type: news
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