Podcast with Dr. Alasdair Munro
This Plenary Session podcast includes an in-depth interview with Dr. Munro, a pediatric infectious disease expert, is an excellent overview of the science we know about how COVID affects children and what we know about childhood transmission dynamics. I urge you to listen.
Report from European CDC on COVID & Schools
- COVID-19 in children and the role of school settings in COVID-19 transmission (European CDC)
“The evidence available strongly suggests that transmission resulting in symptomatic infection of either children or adults is uncommon in schools.” - Read a summary of the ECDC report here.
“It also seems pretty clear that the original decisions by almost all European countries to close schools were, in retrospect, ill-judged measures that caused more harm than good, at least in relation to children under 16 years old.”
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- COVID-19 in children and young people (Science Magazine)
“The role of children in transmission of SARS-CoV-2 remains unclear; however, existing evidence points to educational settings playing only a limited role in transmission when mitigation measures are in place, in marked contrast to other respiratory viruses.” - It’s Time to Put Children and Young People First During the Global COVID-19 Pandemic (JAMA)
“In spite of everything we have known and understood about respiratory viral infections to date, it does now appear that children overall are relatively less susceptible to becoming infected as well having less severe infection itself.” (Read the related meta-analysis study.) - Child deaths tied to covid-19 remain remarkably low, months into U.S. pandemic (Washington Post)
“Health-care officials recognized early in the outbreak that children were much less likely than adults to become infected with the virus, show symptoms, require hospitalization or die of covid-19.“