A new study by researchers from Massachusetts General Hospital, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, MIT and Harvard Medical School has found that infants, children and adolescents are equally capable of carrying high levels of live, replicating SARS-CoV-2 in their respiratory secretions.
This new research reinforces the urgent need to protect children as they return in person to schools and daycare centers and prevent further transmission in their communities.
The study enrolled 110 children aged two weeks to 21 years who tested positive for COVID-19 at Massachusetts General Hospital or urgent care clinics. The children presented with either symptoms concerning for or known exposure to Covid-19 between April 2020 and April 2021. One-third of the participants were identified as Caucasian , 10% identified as African American, and 4% identified as Asian and one third reported their ethnicity as Hispanic.
The majority of participants with COVID-19 did not require hospitalization . But 36 children were hospitalized with Covid-19, and 18 children required supplemental oxygen and/or invasive or noninvasive respiratory support. Nasal samples were taken from adults hospitalized with acute Covid-19 from April 2020 to August 2020 whose symptoms were of equal duration to the hospitalized pediatric cohort and used in comparative studies.
Children were most infectious within the first five days of illness and age did not appear to impact viral load. Interestingly, a high viral load did not correlate with severe disease. Asymptomatic children and children with mild disease displayed significantly higher viral loads than adults hospitalized with COVID-19 with a comparable duration of symptoms.
Lael Yonker, a pediatric pulmonologist at MGH and co-first author with Julie Boucau, a senior research scientist at MGH and the Ragon Institutethat the study answered key questions about high viral loads in children. “There had been the question about whether the high viral load in children correlated with the live virus.
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