The new and more contagious coronavirus variant reported in the United Kingdom that is “spreading and growing rapidly” there has triggered panic across the world, including India.
While severe illness from Covid-19 is relatively rare in children, “there is a hint is that the new strain has a higher propensity to infect children,” said scientist Neil Ferguson, a member of the UK’s New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group (NERVTAG).
“We haven’t established any sort of causality on that, but we can see it in the data,” Ferguson said, adding that “we will need to gather more data to see how it behaves going forward.”
The emergence of the mutated SARS-CoV-2 variant, which scientists say is up to 70% more transmissible than previous strains in the UK, has prompted some countries to close their borders with Britain and pushed large areas of the country into severe restrictions over the Christmas period.
Wendy Barclay, another NERVTAG professor and a specialist in virology at Imperial, said that among the mutations in the new variant are changes to the way it enters human cells, which may mean “that children are, perhaps, equally susceptible to this virus as adults”. “Therefore, given their mixing patterns, you would expect to see more children being infected,” Barclay said.
(With inputs from Reuters)