Does vaccinating adults stop kids from spreading COVID too?
▻https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01549-z
La question sous-jacente : est-il nécessaire de vacciner les enfants ?
In the United States […] cases in children (generally those under the age of 18) fell by 84% between January and May. Just over half of the US population — predominantly adults — has received at least one vaccine dose.
Donc…
… children are most often infected by adults, says Eric Haas, a paediatric infectious-diseases physician and epidemiologist at the Israel Ministry of Health in Jerusalem. “Otherwise, you would expect that if children go back to school, they would just infect each other en masse.”
Mais
But recent data also suggest that unvaccinated children might still be important spreaders of the virus. During May, almost 100 outbreaks — defined as two or more cases — occurred in primary and secondary schools in England.
That number is small, however, representing just a “tiny proportion” of England’s 25,000 schools, says Shamez Ladhani, a paediatric infectious-diseases physician with Public Health England. He also notes that overall infection rates in school-aged children changed little in the six weeks after schools reopened.
Nonetheless, Tang says that transmission in schools shouldn’t be ignored. Britain’s vaccine roll-out has been slower than Israel’s, he argues, and school reopenings have coincided with the increased spread of B.1.617.2 — also known as the Delta variant — in UK communities. As a result, the virus might continue to circulate in children.
This is an important point, he says, because the longer the pandemic continues, the greater the chance that new #variants with some resistance to vaccines will emerge.