By: EJ Mundell
The largest study of its kind finds that children can carry exceedingly high amounts of the new coronavirus, even in the absence of symptoms.
Researchers say that could make them ideal “silent spreaders” of COVID-19, throwing the safety of reopening schools into question.
“If schools were to reopen fully without necessary precautions, it is likely that children will play a larger role in this pandemic,” said study senior author Dr. Alessio Fasano. He directs the Mucosal Immunology and Biology Research Center at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.
The study of 192 children and young adults — newborns to 22-year-olds — found that 49 tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 and another 18 showed symptoms of COVID-19 illness.
What’s more, infected children harbored very high levels of virus within their airways — viral loads exceeding those of very sick adult patients cared for in intensive care units.
That’s important, because the ability of an infected person to transmit SARS-CoV-2 rises with the amount of virus in their system.
“I was surprised by the high levels of virus we found in children of all ages, especially in the first two days of infection,” said study lead author Dr. Lael Yonker, director of the MGH Cystic Fibrosis Center.
“I was not expecting the viral load to be so high. You think of a hospital, and of all of the precautions taken to treat severely ill adults, but the viral loads of these hospitalized patients are significantly lower than a ‘healthy child’ who is walking around with a high SARS-CoV-2 viral load,” she said in a hospital news release.
Fasano believes the role of kids in spreading COVID-19 may have been underestimated.
“During this COVID-19 pandemic, we have mainly screened symptomatic subjects, so we have reached the erroneous conclusion that the vast majority of people infected are adults,” he said in the release. “However, our results show that kids are not protected against this virus. We should not discount children as potential spreaders for this virus.”
The Boston team agreed that in the vast majority of cases, children infected with the new coronavirus will not come down with severe illness. The real danger lies in their mingling with more vulnerable adults.
The study was published Aug. 20 in The Journal of Pediatrics.
