COVID Cases to Soar in Children but Schools Should Stay Open – EU Health Agency

The benefits of children attending school outweigh the risk of contracting and spreading COVID-19, although cases in children are set to soar in the autumn, said a new report from the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC), published on Thursday (8 July).

The report draws upon and updates evidence presented in the previous ECDC reports on the same topic released in 2020.

It found that in the coming months, COVID-19 cases in children are likely to rise more than in the increasingly vaccinated adults' population, most notably for the Delta variant, which was not factored into previous reports.

The report underscores that children of all ages are "susceptible to and can transmit SARS-CoV-2," but that cases in younger children appear to lead to onward transmission "less frequently than cases in older children and adults".

It also notes that, according to surveillance data, children aged between 1-18 years also have much lower rates of hospitalisation, severe disease requiring intensive hospital care, and death than all other age groups, although the long-term consequences of contracting the virus in the paediatric population remains unclear.

By the time schools reopen for the new school year, children and adolescents will have become the age groups with the lowest rates of COVID-19 vaccination coverage in the EU.

Therefore, in the absence of strict adherence to effective public health mitigation measures, concentrated circulation of COVID-19 is "to be expected", including outbreaks in this age group, the report concludes.

However, despite this rising risk, the general consensus remains that the decision to close schools to control the COVID-19 pandemic should be used only as a last resort.

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