A covid-19 outbreak among children at a Georgia summer camp is a warning
The Georgia camp outbreak is the latest sign that children cannot escape the pandemic. They carry significant viral loads. They do not get as sick or die as often as adults. The big unanswered question is how much do they spread or transmit the disease, and what are the ramifications for reopening schools? Is the Georgia summer camp episode a harbinger of what’s to come if in-person classrooms resume in the fall?
A report published on Thursday in the Journal of the American Medical Association Pediatrics, based on 145 patients with mild to moderate illness in Chicago, showed that young children may have nearly as much viral genetic material as older children or adults. An earlier preliminary study by Christian Drosten in Germany also found “viral loads do not differ significantly” between young and old age groups.
Children seem to suffer less as a result of infection, although a small group have become quite sick. The reported number of deaths from the virus among children under the age of 18 in the United States is less than 1 percent of total deaths, and only 1 percent of total hospitalizations, even though children make up 22 percent of the population. Of all those testing positive, children make up about 7 percent. A National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine paper says more than 90 percent of children who test positive “will have mild symptoms,” and “only a small percentage of symptomatic children (estimates range from 1 to 5 percent) will have severe or critical symptoms.”
How children might transmit the virus is critical, yet not fully understood. A large study in South Korea found that children under age 10 spread the virus within a household at the lowest rate, but those ages 10 to 19 were more likely to spread it than adults. This study, however, was not in schools. The Kaiser Family Foundation reports those nations that did a good job of tamping down community spread of the virus have managed to open schools without major outbreaks, but there are examples, such as Israel, where reopening came with serious school outbreaks. Much seems to depend on community spread. In the United States, the virus is still on the move across many states. The Georgia summer camp outbreak is a warning that children may not be spared sickness, nor the adults around them.
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