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Coronavirus: how many children become infected?
Photo: Bertrand Blay / iStockphoto / Getty Images
How often do children become infected with the coronavirus or pass the pathogen on?
That's one of the big questions in this pandemic.
While restaurants and leisure facilities in Germany will close in the coming weeks and as many employees as possible will be working from home again, daycare centers and schools will remain open.
"The right to education of children and adolescents can best be realized through face-to-face lessons", says a joint decision of the 16 education ministers, which was published the day before the next shutdown decision.
It is known that children are not completely safe from contracting the coronavirus.
We also know that in most cases they will survive the infection very well.
How often they pass on the virus, however, is still difficult to quantify.
Because: Different studies come to different results.
A current study from Bavaria can at least show how often children and young people in the state have been infected with Sars-CoV-2 in recent months.
According to the study, six times more minors were infected with the coronavirus than officially known.
Almost 12,000 blood samples examined
Between January and July, the team from the Helmholtz Center in Munich analyzed almost 12,000 blood samples belonging to children and adolescents between the ages of one and 18.
The blood samples come from participants in the Fr1da study, in which the development of type 1 diabetes is observed.
The number of boys and girls in the study was almost the same.
The participants are considered representative of children and young people in Bavaria.
The scientists use a two-stage antibody test to rule out false-positive results as far as possible.
The team writes that the specificity of the procedure is 100 percent - i.e. everyone who does not have antibodies against Sars-CoV-2 because they have not yet been infected will receive the correct - negative - test result.
The so-called sensitivity is more than 95 percent, which means that the test does not start in less than five percent of those tested who had a coronvirus infection.
The researchers were able to show that the test did not provide any false positive results with the help of almost 4,000 more blood samples from 2019, which were taken before the spread of Sars-CoV-2.
According to the study, only 0.08 percent of the samples then taken from January to March contained antibodies from a previous Sars-CoV-2 infection.
Between April and July, however, an average of 0.87 percent of the samples were positive.
Compared to the cases reported in Bavaria in up to 18-year-olds, the antibody frequency was about six times higher, reports the Helmholtz Center.
According to official data, around 0.16 percent of children and adolescents in Bavaria had a coronavirus infection.
About half of the children and adolescents who tested positive for coronavirus antibodies in the study had no corresponding symptoms of the disease, i.e. an asymptomatic course.
The number of unreported cases that the study uncovered need not come as a surprise: According to various studies from different countries, adults also had up to ten times more Sars-CoV-2 infections than were officially diagnosed and reported, according to the work.
The study also shows: Almost two thirds of the children and adolescents in whom a family member had a proven infection were negative in the antibody test, they had not become infected.
The fact that around a third of the children in the family could have been infected, however, indicates a higher transmission rate than described in previous studies, write the researchers around Markus Hippich and Anette-G.
Bricks from the Helmholtz Center.
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