Kids Do Get The Coronavirus — They Just Don't Get As Sick

A new study suggests that kids are as likely as adults to be infected with the new coronavirus, but their symptoms tend to be mild.

Children are no less likely than adults to become infected with the new coronavirus, but they are less likely to get seriously ill from it.

Those are the results of a new study from China's Shenzhen province uploaded on the preprint site MedRxiv on March 4. The research team, led by scientists from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and the Shenzhen Center for Disease Control and Prevention, followed 391 people who contracted the new coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, between Jan. 12 and Feb. 14, as well as 1,286 of their close contacts. This surveillance of close contacts allowed the researchers to understand how the disease spread through friends, colleagues and family members.

The study is not yet peer-reviewed, but it did reproduce a pattern that researchers have been observing since early in the outbreak: Children don't seem to get sick with COVID-19, the disease caused by the virus, at the same rate adults do. This is likely because children have healthier lungs than adults do (they don't smoke and have fewer years of exposure to pollution) and because adults are more likely to have dangerous immune responses to respiratory diseases, experts told Live Science last month.

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