A new study from UK investigators shows that — while most COVID-19 patients ages 11 to 17 who reported long-COVID symptoms 3 months after the initial infection no longer experienced lingering symptoms at 2 years — 29% still did.
The findings, published in the journal Communications Medicine, come from the National Long COVID in Children and Young People cohort study, which followed up on thousands of young people after their COVID-19 diagnoses.
Comments closedSince the COVID pandemic began, claims that the disease poses only minimal risk to children have spread widely, on the presumption that the lower rate of severe acute illness in kids tells the whole story. Notions that children are nearly immune to COVID and don’t need to be vaccinated have pervaded.
These ideas are wrong. People making such claims ignore the accumulating risk of long COVID, the constellation of long-term health effects caused by infection, in children who may get infected once or twice a year. The condition may already have affected nearly six million kids in the U.S. Children need us to wake up to this serious threat. If we do, we can help our kids with a few straightforward and effective measures.
Comments closedScientists investigating long COVID in youth found similar but distinguishable patterns between school-age children (ages 6-11 years) and adolescents (ages 12-17 years) and identified their most common symptoms. The study, supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and published in JAMA, comes from research conducted through the NIH’s Researching COVID to Enhance Recovery (RECOVER) Initiative, a wide-reaching effort to understand, diagnose, treat, and prevent long COVID, a condition marked by symptoms and health problems that linger after an infection with SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19.
Children and adolescents were found to experience prolonged symptoms after SARS-CoV-2 infection in almost every organ system with most having symptoms affecting more than one system.
Comments closedA study today in Clinical Infectious Diseases conducted across 12 tertiary care pediatric hospitals in Canada and the United States shows that asymptomatic children with COVID-19, especially preschoolers, contribute significantly to household transmission.
The researchers discovered that 10.6% of exposed household contacts developed symptomatic illness within 14 days of exposure to asymptomatic test-positive children, a rate higher than expected.
“We determined that the risk of developing symptomatic illness within 14 days was 5 times greater among household contacts of asymptomatic SARS-CoV-2–positive children,” the authors wrote.
They also found that 6 of 77 asymptomatic SARS-CoV-2–infected children during a 3-month follow-up developed long COVID, or 7.8% of them.
Comments closedA study of 1,037,936 US children seen in 17 healthcare systems across the country shows that COVID-19 vaccines are moderately protective against long COVID: 35% to 45%, with higher rates in adolescents. The study was published today in Pediatrics.
The researchers estimated vaccine effectiveness (VE) against long COVID in children aged 5 to 17 years. Though severe COVID-19 cases are less common in children than in adults, persistent symptoms in children do occur.
“It is difficult to establish how much this results from differential reporting of symptoms at different ages, greater difficulty distinguishing long COVID from other childhood illnesses or effects of the pandemic (eg, disruption of seasonal viral patterns, or of school progress,” the authors wrote.
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