A new study that centered on global coronavirus transmission data discovered that young people and children are about 40% less likely to be infected with COVID-19 as compared to adults when exposed to an individual who has the virus.
The study, which was co-led by researchers from University College London and published in JAMA Pediatrics, added more than 13,900 studies to its May pre-print in order to update their meta-analysis and systematic review. The additional studies were used to understand how susceptible children were to the coronavirus and whether they transmitted the infection to others.
Professor Russell Viner, who is the lead author of the study stated that they their findings showed that children between 12-14 years appeared significantly less likely to contract the coronavirus from other infected individuals. This comes after the study had assessed two times as many coronavirus population screening and contact tracing studies, which provided them with strong data and conclusions.
However, the data on teenagers was less clear, which led the researchers to assume that teens were just as susceptible to the virus as adults. The research findings discovered that susceptibility was an important element in the chain of infection. The findings also supported the notion that children were likely to play a much smaller role in virus transmission and multiplication of cases in the pandemic, although some uncertainty still remains.
The professor added that the new data discovered would provide additional proof that would be important to governments globally, assisting them in their decision-making to keep learning institutions open amid the pandemic.
The researchers screened a total of 13,962 studies which had been published on PubMed and MedRxiv. These studies helped them determine the 32 studies from 21 nations globally that had useful data. In their entirety, the studies included 268,945 adults and 41,640 young people and children. Young people were defined as individuals under the age of 20 in these studies.
The analysis highlights that young people and children, who are under or between the ages of 12 to 14 had a 44% less chance of contracting SARS-CoV-2 from an infected individual in comparison with adult aged above 20.
While the study gives no information concerning the infectiousness of children, it concludes that children would play a very small role in SARS-CoV-2 transmission at a population level seeing as very few children would be infected by the virus for starters. This conclusion is likely to come as good news to biomedical entities like Predictive Oncology (NASDAQ: POAI) since there is one less vulnerable section for society to worry about during this pandemic.
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