t of the scientific Council, first in line for advising the government in this health crisis. “There has been no major outbreaks from schools, except in the Oise, where the virus came from outside,” he added. The risk of transmission by children was deemed “possible, but not certain” by the specialist who recognized yet on 15 April, during a parliamentary hearing, missing data on the ability of transmission of the virus between children and of children to their family.
The logic of the low capacity of transmission has yet been taken by the minister of Health Olivier Véran on France 2 on 21 April. “The studies are in the process of stabilization”, had indicated the latter. “One tends to think that the more the children are small, especially those under ten years of age, the greater the risk of transmission would be low,” he added, claiming at the time to give that information out “in the conditional tense, because the evolution of scientific knowledge on this virus is constant”.
What studies have been done on the contamination by the children ?
The study, “Coville” conducted in the Ile-de-France on more than 600 children and detailed earlier in our article look also for a contagious and very low among younger children : the child would be beautiful and much less contagious even when they are affected by the coronavirus. According to the study led by professor Cohen, the children’s positive seem in majority to have been infected by an adult, 87,3% of them “have had a contact with confirmed or suspected” with an older person in their family affected by the coronavirus. The one who is also the vice-president of the French Society of pediatrics and who leads the Group of infectious diseases pediatric (GPIP) also says in Le Parisien that only 0.6% of children displaying a test PCR positive were truly contagious.
“At the beginning of the crisis, it was believed, as for other respiratory viruses – that [the children] played an important role in the spread of the epidemic. This is not the case. The evidence has been piling up”, slice Robert Cohen. According to him, “this disease mainly affects adults, more severe forms and deaths occurring almost exclusively in elderly patients or those with comorbidities”. In may, Robert Cohen, described already the Covid-19 of the “disease of adults” and argued that the risk of contracting the coronavirus was “extremely low” in the child, “you can say a thousand times lower than in adults”. “Children are little holders, little transmitters, and when they are contaminated it is almost always adults in the family who have contaminated”, forged Robert Cohen, which also minimizes the potential for contamination of the children between them. The pediatrician indicated, finally, that these results “confirm completely the whole of the literature” in science on the subject. And he dared even : “If the epidemic starts again this is not by schools but by adults”.
The study of the Institut Pasteur, led by Arnaud Fontanet in france, indicates that only three probable cases of infection with the SARS-CoV-2 have been listed among 510 students before the schools closed for the school holidays of February, and then to the containment. “These cases have not given rise to secondary cases, either other pupils or among teachers,” says the study suggests, therefore, that the parents would be “the source of the infection to their children in many cases”.
On the question of contagion, the French Society of pediatrics cites also a dozen studies on its website, based generally on samples with extremely low. One of these studies, based on the cluster of les Contamines-Montjoie in the Alps, one of the first of the epidemic in France, has been published on the website of the Clinical Infection Diseases, April 11. It finds that a 9 year-old child, presenting with the symptoms of the coronavirus and tested positive, has not transmitted the disease despite “close interactions within schools”, the latter having attended “three schools and a ski class” before being placed in segregation with the other contaminated of the cottage where a British had spread the virus. In the same group, an “adult asymptomatic” was a “viral load similar to that of a symptomatic patient”. The study suggests in conclusion a dynamic transmission potentially different in children”.
we should also Mention a publication, released in march in the journal the Pediatric Infectious Disease Journal and is based on the work of the universities of Fribourg in Switzerland and Melbourne in Australia, supported themselves on three studies carried out in China. It tends to demonstrate that the children contracting the coronavirus were first in contact with infected adults in their family. The conclusion at the time : “the importance of children in transmission of the virus remains uncertain.” Another study conducted by the Institute of public health of the netherlands from the statistics of the disease in the country seems to finally show that “less than 20 years, play a far lesser role in the spread of the virus than adults, and the elderly.”
studies were less optimistic about the infectiousness of children
It is also necessary to emphasize that other studies have shown less optimistic about the impact and potential of contamination of the coronavirus among children. Among the recent studies that i
