A new Chinese research of coronavirus an infection in youngsters could bring comfort to American parents—and spotlight the knowledge of temporarily closing schools.
That’s because the research, featured March 13 in Nature Medicine, discovered that although children usually exhibit mild symptoms if infected, they will shed the coronavirus long after symptoms disappear.
Across the U.S., native school districts have been briefly calling off classroom activity, instead going online.
The new analysis finds “it could make sense to shut schools because it’s unclear if kids may be able to cross it to others in the community,” said Dr. Robert Glatter. He’s an emergency medicine doctor at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York.
In the research, a group guided by Huimin Xia, of Guangzhou Women and Children’s Medical Center, in Guangzhou, China, completed a study of 745 Chinese babies and children.
The children ranged in age from 2 months to 15 years, and all had experienced “close contact with identified [COVID-19] patients or had been members of families with reported outbreaks,” in keeping with a journal press release.
The good news is 10 kids (1.3%) ended up testing positive for the new coronavirus, Xia’s group reported. All had been admitted to a treatment center—not because they had been overly sick, but because testing of households affected by coronavirus had brought their sickness to light.
