One review of scientific studies about children and the coronavirus found no evidence of children passing the coronavirus to adults. But the review, by the UK Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, doesn’t prove that children can’t get or pass on the virus, and some scientists are reacting to it by downplaying it and urging caution.
The Royal College sums up existing research by saying it’s “unknown” what role children play in passing the virus to adults.
But if it is true that we can’t find a single case of children spreading the virus to adults, that is an immensely important fact. The next step would be studies directly trying to figure out if child-to-adult transmission happens.
So much of the imposition on Americans and people around the world, so much of the liberty and opportunity that has been taken away from us, has been in the effort to stop asymptomatic children from spreading the virus to adults.
States and nations need to share all data relevant to this question rapidly to establish if, how, and how frequently healthy-seeming children can spread the virus. If the answer is not at all, or almost never, or only in rare circumstances, this ought to turbocharge our effort to reopen schools, playgrounds, and youth sports — of course, all under strict new conditions of social distancing, sanitation, and protection for vulnerable people.
The U.K. study shows that children were far less likely to test positive (Vo, Italy, which has been devastated by the virus, tested 70% of its population and found not a single child testing positive).
Here’s what they found about children passing the virus to adults:
“The role of children in passing the disease to others is unknown, in particular given large numbers of asymptomatic cases. Notably, the China/WHO joint commission could not recall episodes during contact tracing where transmission occurred from a child to an adult.”
Here’s one anecdote that makes one wonder, too: “A SARS-CoV2 positive child in a cluster in the French alps did not transmit to anyone else, despite exposure to over 100 people.” In other words, a child was carrying the virus, spent time in close contact with much of the village, and didn’t seem to give it to anyone.
This is, at best, mere absence of evidence. It is certainly not evidence that children don’t spread the virus. But the finding is striking enough that we ought to spend a lot of time and resources figuring it out. If we could restart karate lessons and have summer camps and youth baseball, and let schools start planning for how to reopen safely in the fall, that would be a huge boost to restarting society and the economy.
