As parents wait to hear what will become of this school year, a major fear is that their children will contract Covid-19 once back at school. But Prof Salim Abdool Karim says “the data we have from China shows that this disease is quite mild in children”
Chief among the unknowns is why this disease has a seemingly milder clinical course in children than in adults.
“So the deaths are very low in children and it’s mostly a quite uneventful clinical course. These kids get a bit sick, have a runny nose and a bit of a cough and then recover. A fever was present in only 41% of cases in children while 27% did not have any symptoms of infection or features of pneumonia.
However, 6% of children developed severe illness, with symptoms such as shortness of breath and low levels of oxygen in body tissues. They also stressed that social distancing, and everyday preventative behaviours such as hand washing, remained important for patients of all ages.
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