Children and adults are at similar risk of becoming infected with COVID-19, but there is a “much higher” proportion of infected children who show no symptoms of the virus, according to a report recently published in the American Medical Association’s JAMA Pediatrics.
The study has been led by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), in collaboration with researchers from the University of Utah Health (USA), Columbia University and the Marshfield Laboratory of Virology.
“Often it seemed that the children were not sick because they did not have any symptoms.a”, said Christina Porucznik, professor of Public Health at the University of Utah, who has directed the investigation of 189 families in this place.
Specifically, the study, called C-HEaRT, has analyzed 310 households with one or more children 0 to 17 years in Utah and New York , involving more than 1,200 participants who sent weekly PCRs and completed weekly symptom questionnaires
Each person was generally observed for 17 weeks and the report included a total of 21,465 person-weeks of surveillance time The results were from September 2020 to April 2021, before the Delta variant emerged in the US The findings have determined that children and adults had similar rates of infection ,half of the children were symptomatic , compared to 88 percent of cases in adults.
Furthermore, it has been revealed that in households with one or more infected people, the overall average risk of infection has been 52 percent . The researchers say they will continue to conduct studies to learn whether differences in housing density, the timing of the Delta variant’s appearance, or other factors contributed to the differences in transmission rates in homes in Utah and New York.
Likewise, the rates of infection and the risk of infection in the home will be analyzed, since they may be higher in the general population, due to the fact that the study participants could be more likely to carry out preventive behaviors of COVID-19 .
In conclusion, the results of this study emphasize that many infections in children go unnoticed , which underlines, for Porucznik, the need for surveillance tests and for children to continue with public health safety measures to protect people. people around them.
