Children Aren't Immune to COVID-19
The Claim
Children are immune or “almost immune” to COVID-19 and therefore are not at risk from school reopenings.
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Emerging story
On August 4th, 2020, President Trump claimed during an interview with the hosts of the television show Fox & Friends that "if you look at children, children are almost — and I would almost say definitely — but almost immune from this disease," and then even remarked they are “virtually immune,” while arguing in favor of mass school reopening as the country still fights the lingering effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. He then defended his remarks in a subsequent statement (below).
Users on social media quickly began sharing the claim throughout August 2020.
Misbar’s Analysis
Misbar has found that the President’s claim is false. While there is statistical evidence to suggest that children experience a far milder case of the illness, there is no evidence whatsoever to indicate that they are immune or “virtually immune” to COVID-19 as this would mean they can neither catch the virus nor transmit it to others, which is untrue. There are even many severe cases of the illness in children, and severe complications as a result of the condition, that make the claim even more dangerously incorrect.
While the Mayo Clinic has indicated that children don’t often experience severe symptoms from COVID-19, there are several studies that prove the condition is no less capable of infecting, and spreading from, children. A major study done in South Korea of over 1200 positive cases in children found that children from the ages of 10-19 are a particularly vulnerable subset, and had the highest rate of transmission to other household contacts of all age groups. Another study was able to discover a startling amount of viral nucleic acid in the upper respiratory tract of children under 5 years old--and more than any other age group. This evidence renders the claim that children are not capable of being major spreaders of the virus to be completely baseless.
However, despite the lack of severe symptoms in the majority of younger children, there are still incredible risks associated with a COVID-19 infection for those age groups. Recently the Harvard Medical School published a report on the dangers of multisystem inflammatory syndrome (or MIS-C), an extremely dangerous complication of a COVID-19 infection specifically in children that can lead to even worse symptoms than a typical infection and even hospitalization.
We’re even seeing the effects of this vulnerability and risk of spread in real time as many schools have already chosen to re-open for study and found themselves wholly unprepared for the continued spread through these age groups. The American Academy of Pediatrics has already reported a 90% increase in positive pediatric patients in the four week period from July 9th through August 6th, with over 180,000 cases total.
There have been thousands of cases that have caused re-closures and new quarantines in Mississippi, Florida, and Georgia in addition to a major spike at the University of Notre Dame that caused them to once again halt in-person classes and quarantine thousands of students. Thus it is clear that no matter how innocuous COVID-19 may be for many children, it is hardly the case that they are immune to the condition and absolutely still possible for them to spread the disease to those around them at school and at home.
