Why Children Seem To Be Less Affected By the Coronavirus
Doctors report seeing fewer children affected by COVID-19, even in places like Washington, which experienced the first burst of cases in the country. Moffitt, too, is not seeing as many younger children needing medical care at her own hospital. “We are seeing that the relative protection against severe disease among pediatric patients is holding true,” she says. “There are very, very few pediatric patients requiring hospitalization.
She stresses that it’s still early in doctors’ understanding of the virus to draw any conclusions about how young children are able to avoid serious illness. But researchers have their theories. One is that, for some reason, younger children don’t seem to mount the aggressive immune response in response to the virus that adults do; it’s this intense immune reaction that can act as friendly fire in the lungs and make breathing difficult.
“We do know that children’s immune responses evolve over time,” says Maldonado. “The first year of life, children don’t have the same robust immune response that older children and adults do.” That could explain why the CDC report found that the youngest infants were more likely to need hospitalization.
One related area of research for better understanding what type of defenses young children have against a virus like SARS-CoV-2 might come from studies of pregnant mothers infected with the virus, since newborns tend to rely on maternal immunity until their systems develop. The data so far are very inconclusive, however.
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