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What’s the Deal With Kids and the Coronavirus: Five Leading Theories
As politicians debate whether schools should reopen, scientists consider whether kids’ protection is biological or behavioral
One of the biggest enigmas since the beginning of the pandemic has been how kids respond to the novel coronavirus. Children, particularly those under the age of 10, don’t appear to be as vulnerable to the virus as adults are, and scientists and pediatricians aren’t sure why. For one thing, this observation conflicts with the fact that children are typically more susceptible to respiratory infections. “In my field, almost everything infects kids more than it does adults,” says Alfin Vicencio, MD, chief of the division of pediatric pulmonology at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. “This is an unusual situation.”
Early data from Europe and Asia provided hope that children were nearly immune to the virus. In Iceland, zero out of 848 randomly selected children under the age of 10 tested positive for the coronavirus, and children who were tested because of suspected exposure to the virus were half as likely to be positive as adults were. An early study from China reported similar numbers, with only 1% of all Covid-19 cases occurring in children under the age of 10, and another 1% of cases in…
