A new study of healthcare workers in Scotland suggests that adults who are around schoolchildren are less likely to contract the coronavirus.
“Background Children are relatively protected from novel coronavirus infection (COVID-19),” the study’s abstract reads. “The reasons for this protection are not well understood but differences in the immune response to Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) have been implicated. If such differences are due to differential exposure to non-SARS-CoV-2 infectious agents, adults who are close contacts of children may partly share in this protection.”
The study, published Tuesday on the pre-peer-review website medRxiv, observed 300,000 Scottish healthcare workers and determined that those living with young children ages 0-11 were significantly less likely to contract coronavirus and possibly were also less likely to be hospitalized. Moreover, it found that the risk of hospitalization with COVID-19 was lower in adults who shared a house with one child, yet “lower still in those with two or more children.”
The study comes as nations across the world grapple with the decision of whether or not to send children back to school, with many fearing that children will spread the virus to their families at home, which this study appears to contradict.
“Such a protective effect would have important implications for the lives of children, not least in terms of schooling,” the study adds.
“If differential exposure to infectious agents is an important mechanism [in protecting children], adults who are close contacts of children, such as childcare providers, teachers, and parents may also benefit,” it continues. “If exposure to children was found to be protective, rather than harmful, this would have important implications for policy. Few studies, however, have examined this question.”
A study out of Germany examining the “association of contact to small children with mild course of COVID-19” had similar results, finding that people with more exposure to children became ill at a lower rate than the general population. “These findings are not well explained by age, gender or BMI distribution of those patients and should be validated in other settings.”
An article published in the Washington Post on Wednesday with the headline “Feared coronavirus outbreaks in schools yet to arrive, early data show,” appeared to align with the findings of the Scottish study.
“Everyone had a fear there would be explosive outbreaks of transmission in the schools. In colleges, there have been. We have to say that, to date, we have not seen those in the younger kids, and that is a really important observation,” Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, said in the article.
A University of Vermont commentary piece published in the journal Pediatrics in July looked at coronavirus infection rates in children from China, Switzerland, and Australia and concluded “that children infrequently transmit Covid-19 to each other or to adults and that many schools, provided they follow appropriate social distancing guidelines and take into account rates of transmission in their community, can and should reopen in the fall.”
