1887

Abstract

At the start of the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) pandemic, there was much uncertainty about the role of children in infection and transmission dynamics. Through the course of the pandemic, it became clear that children were susceptible to SARS-CoV-2 infection, although they were experiencing a notable lack of severe disease outcomes as compared to the adult population. This trend held true with the emergence of new SARS-CoV-2 variants, even in paediatric populations that were ineligible to be vaccinated. The difference in disease outcomes has prompted questions about the virological features of SARS-CoV-2 infection in this population. In order to determine if there was any difference in the infectivity of the virus produced by children with coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), we compared viral RNA levels (clinical RT-qPCR ) and infectious virus titres from 144 SARS-CoV-2-positive clinical samples collected from children aged 0 to 18 years old. We found that age had no impact on the infectiousness of SARS-CoV-2 within our cohort, with children of all ages able to produce high levels of infectious virus.

Funding
This study was supported by the:
  • National Institute of General Medical Sciences (Award P30GM118228-04)
    • Principle Award Recipient: EmilyA Bruce
  • This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License.
Loading

Article metrics loading...

/content/journal/acmi/10.1099/acmi.0.000547.v4
2023-05-26
2024-03-28
Loading full text...

Full text loading...

/deliver/fulltext/acmi/5/5/acmi000547.v4.html?itemId=/content/journal/acmi/10.1099/acmi.0.000547.v4&mimeType=html&fmt=ahah

References

  1. Lee B, Raszka WV. COVID-19 transmission and children: the child is not to blame. Pediatrics 2020; 146:e2020004879 [View Article] [PubMed]
    [Google Scholar]
  2. Lu X, Zhang L, Du H, Zhang J, Li YY et al. SARS-CoV-2 infection in children. N Engl J Med 2020; 382:1663–1665 [View Article] [PubMed]
    [Google Scholar]
  3. Wang L, Berger NA, Kaelber DC, Davis PB, Volkow ND et al. Incidence rates and clinical outcomes of SARS-CoV-2 infection with the Omicron and Delta variants in children younger than 5 years in the US. JAMA Pediatr 2022; 176:811–813 [View Article] [PubMed]
    [Google Scholar]
  4. Klimstra WB, Tilston-Lunel NL, Nambulli S, Boslett J, McMillen CM et al. SARS-CoV-2 growth, furin-cleavage-site adaptation and neutralization using serum from acutely infected hospitalized COVID-19 patients. J Gen Virol 2020; 101:1156–1169 [View Article] [PubMed]
    [Google Scholar]
  5. Despres HW, Mills MG, Shirley DJ, Schmidt MM, Huang M-L et al. Measuring infectious SARS-CoV-2 in clinical samples reveals a higher viral titer:RNA ratio for Delta and Epsilon vs. Alpha variants. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 2022; 119:e2116518119 [View Article] [PubMed]
    [Google Scholar]
  6. Chung E, Chow EJ, Wilcox NC, Burstein R, Brandstetter E et al. Comparison of symptoms and RNA levels in children and adults with SARS-CoV-2 infection in the community setting. JAMA Pediatr 2021; 175:e212025 [View Article] [PubMed]
    [Google Scholar]
  7. Yonker LM, Boucau J, Regan J, Choudhary MC, Burns MD et al. Virologic features of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 infection in children. J Infect Dis 2021; 224:1821–1829 [View Article] [PubMed]
    [Google Scholar]
  8. Bullard J, Dust K, Funk D et al. Predicting infectious SARS-cov-2 from diagnostic samples. Clin Infect Dis 2020
    [Google Scholar]
  9. Garnett L, Tse C, Funk D, Dust K, Tran KN et al. Differential infectivity of original and Delta variants of SARS-CoV-2 in children compared to adults. Microbiol Spectr 2022; 10:e0039522 [View Article] [PubMed]
    [Google Scholar]
  10. Zhu Y, Chew KY, Wu M, Karawita AC, McCallum G et al. Ancestral SARS-CoV-2, but not Omicron, replicates less efficiently in primary pediatric nasal epithelial cells. PLoS Biol 2022; 20:e3001728 [View Article] [PubMed]
    [Google Scholar]
  11. Puhach O, Adea K, Hulo N, Sattonnet P, Genecand C et al. Infectious viral load in unvaccinated and vaccinated patients infected with SARS-CoV-2 WT, Delta and Omicron. medRxiv 2022; 2022: [View Article]
    [Google Scholar]
  12. Corman VM, Landt O, Kaiser M, Molenkamp R, Meijer A et al. Detection of 2019 novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) by real-time RT-PCR. Euro Surveill 2020; 25:3 [View Article] [PubMed]
    [Google Scholar]
  13. Zimmermann P, Curtis N. Why is COVID-19 less severe in children? A review of the proposed mechanisms underlying the age-related difference in severity of SARS-CoV-2 infections. Arch Dis Child 2020archdischild-2020-320338 [View Article] [PubMed]
    [Google Scholar]
  14. Gangavarapu K, Latif AA, Mullen JL, Alkuzweny M, Hufbauer E et al. Outbreak.info genomic reports: scalable and dynamic surveillance of SARS-CoV-2 variants and mutations. Nat Methods 2023; 20:512–522 [View Article] [PubMed]
    [Google Scholar]
http://instance.metastore.ingenta.com/content/journal/acmi/10.1099/acmi.0.000547.v4
Loading
/content/journal/acmi/10.1099/acmi.0.000547.v4
Loading

Data & Media loading...

This is a required field
Please enter a valid email address
Approval was a Success
Invalid data
An Error Occurred
Approval was partially successful, following selected items could not be processed due to error