For the most part, children have not been affected by the Covid-19 epidemic, one of the enduring mysteries of the global health crisis that has led to over 6 million deaths.
When Covid emerged in late 2019, scientists scrambled to understand the virus and how to combat it, with hospitals trying different techniques to save the worst-off Covid patients in intensive care units.
Most of the patients were adults, posing a mystery for public health experts as to why kids were not dying from Covid or becoming severely ill.
Scientists are perplexed as to why children are unaffected by Covid, although studies are showing how children respond to Covid differently than adults.
A number of theories have been suggested, including a more effective innate immune response, less risk of immune over-reaction as occurs in severe Covid, fewer underlying co-morbidities and possibly fewer ACE-2 receptors in the upper respiratory epithelium.
There is a body of evidence that supports the idea that Covid poses a smaller risk to kids.
As our immune systems become less effective at fighting infections, the risk posed to adults from Covid increases.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says that people in their 50s and 60s are more likely to get very sick than people in their 70s and 80s. Adults are more likely to get seriously ill if they have certain underlying medical conditions.
There have been several recent studies looking at the difference between adults and children with the latter having a more robust immune response.
The research was published in the Nature journal in December and found a stronger immune response in the airways of children.
The researchers saw a less rapid immune response in adults, which meant the virus was better able to invade other parts of the body where it was harder to control.
Out of the many hypotheses currently circulating in the literature, the best evidence to date supports the hypothesis that children have a stronger innate immune response.
Children are more susceptible to the Multisystem Inflammatory Syndrome, which is an immune response to Covid-19 that leads to inflammation in organs other than the lung.
Children have an advantage in that they are exposed to more viruses during term time when they are more likely to spread them. The most commonviruses that children get are innocuous colds, which are caused by several types of virus including rhinoviruses, respiratory syncytial virus, and coronaviruses.
The family of coronaviruses that cause mild to moderate upper-respiratory tract illnesses in humans, including Covid-19, have emerged as global health threats.
Children's immune systems have a number of advantages when it comes to fighting infections, according to a professor at the University of Applied Sciences.
They go through a lot of infections when they are young because their immune systems are challenged.
He said that children get lots of contact with other coronaviruses at this time so their immune system is in training.
The phenomenon is not unique to Covid-19, with children often able to fight off other kinds of infections better than adults, according to Dr Andrew Freedman.
Most children don't develop symptoms from Hepatitis A, while teenagers and young adults who present with glandular fever are more likely to develop it.
The risk of the virus to children was found to be very low by research published in late 2021.
Researchers from several British universities studied the deaths of children and young people in England during the first year of the Pandemic in order to differentiate between those who died of Covid and those who died of an alternative cause.
Kids in a queue while wearing face masks during the food distribution amid Coronavirus COVID 19.It found that of the 3,105 children and young people who died from all causes in the first year of the Pandemic year in England, 25 of them had died of Covid, corresponding to an overall mortality rate of 2 deaths per million children in England.
Some children with multiple comorbidities and life-limiting conditions were among the 25 children that sadly died of Covid.
The other six children that died appeared to have no underlying health conditions, but researchers cautioned that there may have been an unidentified comorbidity or a genetic predisposition to severe disease with Covid infections.
The study found that the overall risk to children was extremely low, but it did note that those above the age of 10, of Asian and Black ethnicity, and those with comorbidities were over-insured.
The study concluded that Covid is very rarely fatal among children with underlying comorbidities. An estimated 476,962 children in England had Covid, meaning that they had a chance of surviving the disease.
The data from the U.S. shows low risks to children.
The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported last week that Covid had caused over one million deaths in the US during the Pandemic. Out of 73,508 deaths in this age group that were caused by all causes, 921 were caused by Covid.
The latest state-based data summary published last week by the American Academy of Pediatrics said that children accounted for 19 percent of all Covid cases in the U.S.
For the week ending March 17 children accounted for 18.3% of reported weekly cases. 22.2% of the U.S. population are children under the age of 18.
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