Irene Hartmann
04/23/2021 6:00 AM
Clarín.com
Society
Updated 04/23/2021 6:00 AM
The school closure, the exponential increase in the second wave, knowing that the internees are younger than before and certain alarmist information that circulated about
serious pictures in boys
in the Ricardo Gutiérrez and Garrahan children's hospitals - presumably due to the new variants of coronavirus - They aroused
great concern in families with children
.
Here, the answers to the main questions about the relationship between Covid and children, and what is known about vaccination in that segment.
1. It was said that Covid slightly affected boys.
Did something change with the new variants?
Viruses are dynamic and unpredictable, so no statement will be categorical.
However, today the answer is "no": even though they are more contagious,
the new variants of coronavirus
that are gaining ground in Argentina (the United Kingdom and Manaus, or P1) do not affect the children of a differently from those that were already circulating in the country.
As Angela Gentile, the head of the Epidemiology Department of the “Ricardo Gutiérrez” Children's Hospital, has been explaining in the media,
“the pediatric pattern remains the same”
.
In other words, they are mostly mild cases, and moderate and severe (taking the updated data from the Garrahan Hospital), 80% correspond to children who contracted Covid and have some underlying disease.
2. Why in the second wave it is said that there are more boys in boarding schools?
In pediatric matters, it is very easy to generate an alarm.
The experts in pediatric infectology have been explaining that, in a context of a rapidly rising epidemic regrowth,
there will clearly be more infections in all age segments
.
Children are no exception: unlike older adults (of whom a drop in infections is presumed due to having better sustained isolation in addition to the “vaccination campaign” effect), children are proportionally more exposed.
As infections increase (this includes, in the known proportions, asymptomatic, mild, moderate and severe), the situation becomes more visible (and is more communicated by the media) due to the logical tension that impacts on the health system .
3. What is Multisystemic Inflammatory Syndrome?
The
Multisystemic Inflammatory Syndrome (SIM)
is a condition that was seen in Europe and the United States at the beginning of the pandemic and that had a slight correlation in Argentina. It is an excessive reaction of the immune system (treatable, with positive results) that appears in some boys as
a late effect
(after even having a negative PCR) of coronavirus.
The incidence is low
: according to the prestigious journal Nature, it affects around 1 in 1,000 children ("and possibly less", they clarify).
Already in August,
Clarín
reported that it is a picture similar to the well-known Kawasaki syndrome and that, as it is easily confused with other viruses, it is advisable to consult the pediatrician quickly if any of these signs appear: fever sustained for three days, non-purulent conjunctivitis - type 'dry eye'-, rashes or spots on the skin and edema in the hands and feet.
However, beyond being cautious about these signs, it is worth remembering again that cases in the population
will become proportionally more "visible" the more
Covid
infections grow
in general.
4. If it affects them little in general, are the boys going to be vaccinated?
A recent note in the journal
Nature
compiles the opinions of different experts in pediatric infectology of international stature and sheds light on this question: although it is rare for children to have severe forms of the disease due to SARS-CoV-2, the global search for Generating
herd immunity
in populations through vaccination (with the logical intention of blocking all alleys through which the virus circulates) is a plan that
involves immunizing children and adolescents as well
.
Even though the youngest ones are known to be not great contagioners, the intention to eradicate the pathogen or minimize its circulation as much as possible is based on a central fact, and that is that the more times the virus replicates in a community, the
more “ shirt changes ”will do
.
Those random changes that the virus makes in its appearance (mutations) lead to the emergence of what we know as “variants”.
Some do not revert to particular importance;
others (so-called "variants of concern") could be more contagious and even more virulent.
5. What is known about the advances in childhood vaccination?
Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna have already started vaccination trials in boys. The most advanced are from Pfizer and in adolescents, with promising results, and they have already begun a line of research in children under 12 years of age. Moderna began studying her vaccine in children last month. Sputnik is the only one that is applied in Argentina that announced its foray into these tests: it
would start them soon
, although more details were awaited at the end of this note. AstraZeneca, on the other hand, discontinued its research on boys.
What is estimated (based on the provisional results of Pfizer) is that, the younger the volunteers, the
higher the antibody response
, since they have more "cells of the immune system that did not detect pathogens," he explained to Nature Donna Farber, an American immunologist at Columbia University.
This reverses a couple of obstacles typical of childhood, which have to do with the substantial differences in development, according to different ages, taking into account that the objective of pharmaceutical companies is to obtain vaccines against Covid for the entire spectrum ranging from adolescents to infants.
Thus, considering the different levels of antibodies according to age, the first challenge is to
determine the precise doses for the different groups
. The second is to find the right equation within the bulky childhood vaccination scheme, in order to avoid fruitless competition in the generation of antibodies.
