news-date">04/27/2020
A recent study published in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) reports the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus in the Icelandic population. She concludes that children under 10 years of age have fewer SARS-CoV-2 infections than adolescents or adults.
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Women were less likely to fall ill than men. The researchers also found that many people who tested positive said they had no symptoms (although the symptoms most likely developed later in some of them).
Targeted tests
COVID-19 was first diagnosed in Iceland on February 28. However, the tests had started a month earlier, on January 31, 2020. High-risk individuals were tested for SARS-CoV-2 infection. This mainly included people who were already symptomatic (cough, fever, body aches and shortness of breath), who returned to Iceland from regions which the health authorities considered to be risky or who were in contact with infected people.
About 6% of the nation is recorded
By April 4, 2020, over 22,000 Icelandic residents had been tested on SARS-CoV-2, or approximately 6% of the total population. Of the 9,199 people selected for testing, 1,221 tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 (13.3%). Of the 13,080 people tested as part of a population screening (population screening), 100 were positive (0.8%): 87 of the 10,797 (0.8%) people who accepted an open invitation to test, and 13 of 2,283 (0.6%) people who were invited at random. Most of the people who had been targeted and who had received positive tests at the start of the study had previously traveled to other countries, unlike those who tested positive later in the study.
Children under the age of 10 are less affected
The study found that children under the age of ten in the target group showed a lower risk of a positive test than adolescents aged ten and older (6.7% vs. 13.7%). Up to the age of 20, the number of adolescents who tested positive increased. No child under ten was tested positive in the population screening group, compared to 0.8% of ten-year-old and older children. In addition, a lower percentage of women than men received positive results – both in the “target test group” (11.0% vs. 16.7%) and in the population screening group (0.6% vs. 0.9%). It is not known whether the lower incidence of positive results in under 10-year-olds and women is due to lower exposure to the virus or to biological resistance. In other studies, researchers have found that infected children and women are less likely to become seriously ill than adults and men, respectively.
The work suggests that the containment efforts of the Icelandic authorities have proven effective, as the proportion of infected people identified by population screening “did not change significantly during the screening period”. These efforts included the examination of symptomatic subjects starting one month before the first confirmed SARS-CoV-2 case in Iceland and various social distancing measures imposed approximately two weeks after the first confirmed case. In addition, all participants who tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 had to isolate themselves until ten days after their fever subsided (or until they tested negative) and all people who were in contact with people who tested positive had to go into self-imposed quarantine for two weeks.
The experts’ conclusion: social distancing was effective, but further efforts were necessary
The measures for containment such as “keeping your distance”, quarantine etc. proved to be effective according to the authors. As a result, the frequency of SARS-CoV-2 infection in the entire Icelandic population was kept stable from March 13 to April 1. However, the virus has spread so much that efforts to contain the virus are likely to fail if contacts are not tested and isolated, contacts are followed and quarantined, the researchers conclude.
RKI: Child transmission may play a role in the advanced stage of the pandemic
“Especially in an advanced stage of the pandemic, in which many – even undetected – infections already occur, transmission through children and adolescents seems to play a role,” says the Robert Koch Institute (RKI) in the article “What is known about children? “. In Epidemiological Bulletin 19, which was published on April 23, the RKI reports of studies that have found similar susceptibility to infection in children and adults. According to this, 7.4% of children under the age of ten who have had contact with an infected person become infected. The average infection rate for all age groups is 7.9%. Regardless of the age group, infected people without disease signs play a major role in transmission, according to the RKI.
Source: Iceland Review, New England Journal of Medicine, RKI (1), RKI (2)
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