Will COVID become a disease of the young?

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Will COVID become a disease of the young?

July 8, 2021 by dsmolyar

Will COVID become a disease of the young?

Reporter: Danielle Smolyar, Research Assistant 3 – Text Analysis for 2.0 LPBI Group’s TNS #1 – 2020/2021 Academic Internship in Medical Text Analysis (MTA)

An increase of infections among youth who are unvaccinated in countries with high vaccination rates is getting noticed in the role of young people in the pandemic.

On June 21 is Ross Ministry of health recommended that all individuals between the ages of 12 and 15 should be vaccinated. This makes the nation one of the few that have been approved vaccinations for younger kids. This decision came about in response too many other countries with high rates of vaccination are experiencing an increase in numbers of infections that are found to be in younger age groups.

Israel’s vaccination campaign which has reached to more than 85% of the adult population to be vaccinated noticed that case numbers are dropping around a dozen daily in the month of June. At the end of June, they have realized that the cases began to rise to more than 100 cases a day. These cases were found in kids under the age of 16 which is why the government decided to allow vaccinations.

Ran Balicer, and epidemiologists at Israel’s largest healthcare provider in Tel Aviv said that the younger profile is not surprising.

image source: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01862-7

This trend that Israel started to notice is not just happening in Israel. The United States and the United Kingdom COVID-19, “become a disease of the unvaccinated, who are predominantly young”, says Joshua Goldstein, a demographer at the University of California, Berkeley. Stated in the article.

This trend has been occurring in the countries where the older population were being vaccinated first. Follow the drop in age because they were vaccinating older people who are the most at risk for the disease.

This shift has shut attention to the studies of transmission in the younger age groups. Karin Magnusson immunologist said that it has come very important to understand the burden of the disease among the younger children.

Magnusson on the impact of COVID-19 in children in Norway. On June 5 pre-print she reported that children see their doctor regularly up to six months after contracting Covid-19.

Balicer, is studying the virus spread in multi-generational households in Israel. Going beyond whether vaccinating children or not the patterns of COVID-19 infection have caused discussions about mask wearing to adolescence and kids in Israel.

As stated in the article, “As the burden of cases shifts towards younger people, arguments for vaccinating adolescents will become slightly more compelling,” agrees Nick Bundle, an epidemiologist at the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control in Stockholm.” However, the risk of disease in children still is low and in other countries the total number of cases have declined.

Countries also need to consider the global contacts. As stated in the article, “Are we really better off giving the vaccine to kids in rich countries than to older people [in less wealthy countries] where it might have a much bigger impact on people’s lives?” says Jennie Lavine, who studies infectious-disease dynamics at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. “It seems hard for me to imagine a really good argument for that.”

Oh there is a downward shift and the average age of infected with COVID-19 in countries with high COVID-19 vaccination rates it may be short-lived. There could be a few scenarios where the shift could bounce back says Henrik Salje, who is an infectious disease epidemiologist at the University of Cambridge, UK. Many of the countries could start vaccinating the adolescence just like Israel and the United States are already doing so.

Bundle says that COVID- 19 can still be present in younger kids. “But how big a problem that is, is not a simple thing to respond to.”

SOURCE: Mallapaty, S. (2021, July 8). Will COVID become a disease of the young? Nature News. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01862-7

Other related articles published on this Open Access Online Scientific Journal include the following:

Reporter: Jason S Zielonka, MD