COVID-19 Study: Individuals Under The Age Of 20 Half As Likely To Contract The SARS-CoV-2 Coronavirus But Many Will Not Exhibit Symptoms
Source: COVID-19 Study Jun 16, 2020 4 years, 6 months, 6 days, 21 hours, 16 minutes ago
COVID-19 Study: Individuals under the age of 20 are half as likely to contract COVID-19 as the rest of the population, according to new modeling study released today by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. The study also suggests four out of five infected young individuals will show no symptoms.
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The study findings published in the
Nature Medicine Journal could help aid the next moves of governments under pressure to reopen schools and colleges shuttered since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0962-9
The researchers developed age-based COVID-19 transmission models based on data from six countries ie China, Italy, Japan, Singapore, Canada and South Korea.
The team also factored in past studies on estimated infection rates and severity of COVID-19 symptoms.
The researchers estimated that under-20s are at half the risk of COVID-19 infection than over-20s.
The study team also found a wide variation in symptomatic cases linked to age: only 21 percent of those aged 10 to 19 were likely to show symptoms compared with 69 percent of over-70s.
They then simulated COVID-19 outbreaks in 146 capital cities around the world to see what effect school closures had on the spread of the disease.
However unlike influenza outbreaks, where transmission was modeled to be sharply curtailed if schools were closed, the researchers found the measure had little effect on stopping the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus from spreading.
Study co-author Dr Rosalind Eggo told Thailand Medical News, "Whether to reopen schools or not is a complicated question. We have provided some evidence showing an indication of decreased SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus susceptibility in children."
A majority of past studies have shown that COVID-19 symptoms are likely to be more severe the older the patient is.
However there have been relatively few confirmed cases in children, though whether or not this is down to fewer young individuals catching the virus or proportionally fewer showing symptoms when they do is not clear.
Numerous explanations has been offered, including that children are more frequently exposed to coronaviruses and therefore better equipped to fight off COVID-19 infection.
Dr Nicholas Davies, who co-authored the research, said the study did look at a variety of scenarios in which children may be carrying the virus unwittingly.
Dr Davies said, "We were not able to estimate exactly how infectious asymptomatic cases more generally are compared to symptomatic cases. But there is some limited evidence that asymptomatic individuals are less infectious than fully symptomatic individuals and there's certainly a fair amount of evidence suggesting that both asymptomatic and pre-symptomatic individuals are definitely potentially infectious.”
The British researchers said their modeling could "have implications for the likely effectiveness of school closures in tacklin
g COVID-19, which might be less effective than for other respiratory infections".
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