For months, some scientists dismissed the lack of symptomatic COVID-19 infections in children as perhaps a factor of schools being cancelled before the pandemic entered its worst phases. But new research has emerged to suggest that children’s bodies really do process the virus differently than adults, in a way that makes them less susceptible to its most life-threatening excesses.
In a new study that was reported on by the New York Times yesterday, one reason for children’s relative good fortune is that a branch of their immune system that evolved to protect against unfamiliar pathogens rapidly destroys the coronavirus before the virus can do serious damage to its youthful host.
“The bottom line is, yes, children do respond differently immunologically to this virus, and it seems to be protecting the kids,” said Dr. Betsy Herold, a pediatric infectious disease expert at Albert Einstein College of Medicine who led the study. In adults, the body’s immune response to the virus is “much more muted”.
As the NYT explains, when the body encounters an unfamiliar pathogen, it responds within hours with a flurry of immune activity, called an innate immune response. The body’s defenders are quickly recruited to the fight and begin releasing signals calling for backup. Since children more frequently encounter viruses and other pathogens with which their bodies are unfamiliar, their immune responses are typically a lot harsher than adults’.
Over time, an individual’s immune system encounters so many of these biological invaders, that it builds up a large rolodex of frequent pests, then relies on more complicated systems of fighting off bodily threats. At the same time, this ‘innate response’ fades, leaving adults more susceptible to pathogens that are new to the entire population.
One study examining 60 adults and 65 children and young adults under the age of 24, all of whom were hospitalized at the Montefiore Medical Center in New York City from March 13 to May 17, found that children exhibited severe symptoms much less frequently than even the young adults. – READ MORE
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