DECRYPTION – The role of children in the spread of the epidemic was raised very early, by analogy with what happens every winter in other epidemics such as the flu.
r Arnaud Fontanet, director of the global health department at the Institut Pasteur Family Veldman / famveldman – stock.adobe.com
The story of a 9-year-old child infected with Sars-CoV-2 in early February in Contamines-Montjoie (Haute-Savoie), the first cluster in France, is rather reassuring. He did not infect any of the 172 people he was in contact with while he was (mildly) ill with Covid-19. Details of the epidemiological investigation conducted at the time were published on April 11 in the journal Clinical Infectious Disease. A doubly reassuring investigation since the majority of these contacts took place in three different schools and at the ski school, but also because even the two other children of his siblings were not infected.
“The fact that an infected child did not transmit the disease despite close interactions in schools potentially suggests a difference in the dynamics of transmission in children”, conclude the researchers. Scientific data concerning the transmission of the virus by children or adolescents are however too scarce to conclude too
