Studying the case of a nine-year-old child with coronavirus in Contamines-Montjoie in Haute-Savoie, researchers found that he had infected absolutely no one in the three schools and ski club he allegedly attended. while he was ill.
- The first cases of Covid-19 were observed in the Contamines-Montjoie ski resort
- The study carried out on the case of an infected child showed that none of the 172 people he had met were contaminated
- This confirms that the viral load in children would be low and that they would not be very active vectors of the disease.
Children are not vectors of the disease. In a new study published on April 11 in the journal Clinical Infectious Disease, the researchers were interested in a nine-year-old Frenchman who had contracted the coronavirus in Contamines-Montjoie in Haute-Savoie. According to them, he would not have infected anyone in the three schools and the ski club which he then attended.
The little one had been infected, along with twelve other people, by a Briton returning from Singapore. After he tested positive for Covid-19, the alert was given and infectiologists and epidemiologists traced the contacts he may have had since the start of his illness. They counted 172 people, including 112 students and teachers. For greater caution, the latter have all been placed in quarantine at home. However, it finally turned out that the child had not infected anyone, not even his brothers and sisters. On the other hand, other viruses such as the flu were detected in 64% of the “contacts” tested.
“The fact that an infected child did not transmit the disease despite close interactions within schools suggests a potentially different transmission dynamic among children.”conclude the researchers.
A very low viral load
“It is possible that children, because they do not show many symptoms and have a low viral load, transmit little of this new coronavirus”, explains to AFP Kostas Danis, epidemiologist at Public Health France and main author of this study. Indeed, when he fell ill, the young patient had triggered mild symptoms. Eight days later, he had a very low viral load.
“Initially, we all started from the fact that children are great transmitters of microbes. It’s true for the flu, for bacteria… This is the reason why we blocked the schools fairly quickly. The notion that children are said to be less contagious is important because it can play a decisive role in deciding which group of children are going to be reintroduced into schools. This may be an additional argument to say that the little ones may be a good choice. This is a new and interesting concept. One virus is not the other and this is perhaps one of the many surprises that this virus has in store for us”, comments Yves Van Laethem, infectious disease specialist at the CHU Saint-Pierre in Brussels, with RTL-INFO.
Deaths of infected children are extremely rare
However, if the children are very little contagious they can unfortunately fall ill, even if it is rare. According to the latest epidemiological bulletin from Public Health France, 1% of people infected with the new coronavirus are children or adolescents under the age of 15. “Severe forms in young subjects are extremely rare”, explained the Director General of Health, Jérôme Salomon, in his update of March 25.
Rare but not impossible. In France, a 16-year-old girl died of coronavirus contamination on March 25 at the Necker-Enfants hospital in Paris. Then, on April 10, Jérôme Salomon announced the death of a six-year-old boy with Covid-19, the youngest victim of the disease in France. “The causes of death are multiple. said his doctor.
Other countries are also affected by these deaths of young people. In the United States, a baby less than a year old died of Covid-19 infection in the state of Illinois on March 28. In Portugal, a 14-year-old boy died the next day in Santa Maria da Feira, 30 km south of Porto. Then a 13-year-old died in the UK while “placed on life support and plunged into a coma”. As a result, a 12-year-old girl who tested positive for coronavirus died in Belgium. She had had a fever for three days. Finally, on Saturday April 4, it was a five-year-old British child who lost his life to the virus, becoming the youngest victim of Covid-19 recorded in Europe. According to the BBC, he suffered from an underlying medical condition.
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