Association of contact to small children with mild course of COVID-19

Abstract

It is known that severe COVID-19 cases in small children are rare. If a childhood-related infection would be protective against severe course of COVID-19, it would be expected that adults with intensive and regular contact to small children also may have a mild course of COVID-19 more frequently. To test this hypothesis, a survey among 4,010 recovered COVID-19 patients was conducted in Germany. 1,186 complete answers were collected. 6.9% of these patients reported frequent and regular job-related contact to children below 10 years of age and 23.2% had own small children, which is higher than expected. In the relatively small subgroup with intensive care treatment (n=19), patients without contact to small children were overrepresented. These findings are not well explained by age, gender or BMI distribution of those patients and should be validated in other settings.

Sharing a household with children and risk of COVID-19: a study of over 300,000 adults living in healthcare worker households in Scotland

“…We only found one study which touched on this question, a survey of exposures among people who had recovered from SARS-CoV-2. 16 Ours is the first cohort study of which we are aware to formally test this hypothesis, for which the findings provide a degree of support.…”

“…The primary exposure was the number of children aged 0 to 11 (hereafter referred to as young children) in each household. In additional analyses, risks for household members of pre-school children (aged 0-4) and primary school-aged children (aged 5-11) were examined separately as were the risks of sharing a household with older children (aged [12][13][14][15][16][17] and with other adults.…”

“…Few studies, however, have examined this question. 16 We recently reported the risk of hospitalisation for COVID-19 in around 160,000 healthcare workers and 250,000 members of their households in Scotland. 17 Using this cohort, who are at increased risk of exposure to SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19, we now test the hypothesis that the risk of COVID-19 is attenuated where adults share households with children aged 11 and younger.…”

“…This could be relevant to decisions to close nurseries and schools in response to SARS-CoV-2[15] and teachers’ perceptions of workplace safety. [16] Since few relevant studies exist,[17] we used a recently-reported cohort of around 160,000 healthcare workers and 250,000 household members in Scotland,[18] to test the hypothesis that risk of COVID-19 in adults is attenuated among those living with young children.…”

Non-occupational and occupational factors associated with specific SARS-CoV-2 antibodies among Hospital Workers – a multicentre cross-sectional study

“…In line with this hypothesis, adults aged 15 to 44 years (having presumably an increased probability of living with young children) have been shown to have higher antibody titers against the HCoV-OC43 N protein than older adults 18 . Also, supporting the notion of a rather immunological than a purely epidemiological phenomenon, a German study among over 4’000 COVID-19 patients suggested a less complicated disease course for those with frequent contact to children 19 . This hypothesis was partially confirmed by a recent study that demonstrated pre-existing humoral immunity (including neutralizing antibodies) to be particularly prevalent in children and adolescents 20 .…”