For children, the risk of getting seriously ill with Covid-19 is low – this is confirmed by a new study from Great Britain. Most of them were over after six days. However, this is not a reason to prefer infection to vaccination.
Children and Corona, that has been a hot topic since the beginning of the pandemic. Your risk of seriously contracting Covid-19 is considered to be low. But how great is the Corona risk for children really? In a study, British researchers examined the symptoms and children of the disease in infected children. The results have now been published in the journal “The Lancet Child & Adolescent Health”. According to this, most children are already healthy again after six days. According to experts, this is not an argument against vaccination.
For the investigation, the researchers used data provided by parents or other legal guardians via the ZOE Covid app. In total, more than 250,000 children between the ages of 5 and 17 were recorded between the end of March 2020 and the end of February 2021. Valid corona test results were available for 75,529, of which 6975 were verifiably infected with corona. However, evaluable data were only available from 1735 children who had tested positive for Sars-COV-2 and showed symptoms of the disease. The control group served 1734 randomly selected children who tested negative for the coronavirus but were suffering from other infections.
Corona symptoms cannot be checked
“First the good news: The statement: ‘Children have a very low risk of developing Covid-19 seriously’ is confirmed,” said immunologist Carsten Watzl, commenting on the results of the study in a Twitter thread. On average, the sick children had three symptoms – the most common were headache (62 percent), fatigue (55 percent) as well as fever, sore throat, cough and the loss of taste or smell (around 40 percent). One shortcoming of the study, which the researchers themselves admit: the symptoms could not be checked or compared. Thus, the parents’ subjective assessment plays a major role.
According to the study results, children with Covid-19 struggled longer with symptoms than children who had to deal with other infections. On average, the symptoms of the corona-positive children lasted about six days, those of the control group only three days. “Covid is not a cold!” Said Watzl. He explains that 4.4 percent of children with Covid-19 had symptoms for more than 28 days. In the control group, however, it was only 0.9 percent. And: “1.8 percent of children with Covid-19 even had symptoms for more than 56 days,” he writes. 2.9 percent of the children who were infected with corona had to be treated in hospital, compared to 1.5 percent in the control group.
Infection or vaccination?
According to Watzl, the results showed that most children did not have any prolonged problems with Covid-19. Only in a few, according to the study one to two percent, the symptoms last longer than two months. “That is more than in a control group. Fortunately, the symptoms seem to improve over time!” Said the immunologist. Older people were ill a little longer – an average of seven days – than the five to eleven year olds, in whom the symptoms lasted an average of five days. The proportion of those adolescents who still felt symptoms after more than four weeks, at 5.1 percent, was slightly higher among the older than among the younger ones (3.1 percent). “It is reassuring that the number of children who have long suffered from Covid-19 symptoms is very low,” lead author Emma Duncan is quoted in a “Lancet” release.
In fact, the symptoms documented in the study are comparable to those that were also observed as a vaccination reaction, according to Watzl. However, they last less long after vaccination, usually a day or two. In addition, due to the size of the data, the study could not provide any information on rare events such as hospital admissions. “In the vaccination study with 1,131 vaccinated children, there were no other serious side effects, no one in the hospital,” he writes. In 1734 Covid-19 cases or 1131 vaccinated people, such rare events – 0.1 percent of the cases – cannot be seen.
No information about the delta variant
It is known, however, that about 70 out of a million vaccinated children between the ages of 12 and 17 can develop heart muscle inflammation (myocarditis), i.e. one in 14,000. In the case of Covid-19, the number is six times higher, with one in 2200. “This means: The above study cannot be interpreted in such a way that Covid-19 is harmless for children and that the vaccination would pose a higher risk. Serious side effects are extremely rare both in the case of infection and vaccination, “Watzl classifies. However, the study helps to better assess the risk that most children would have from Covid-19. “And that is just very low, only even lower with the vaccination.”
The question remains whether the results can be transferred to the delta variant of the coronavirus. The study period ran until the end of February, but the delta variant did not spread across Europe from Great Britain until the spring.
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