The children who had tested positive were consistently more likely than the children who had tested negative to report at least one long COVID symptom two months later-but not by much. In another study published in the Lancet Child & Adolescent Health in June, researchers in Denmark sent a nationwide survey to parents of children from birth to 14 years old who had tested either positive or negative for SARS-CoV-2 between January 2020 and July 2021. “There’s been an impact of the pandemic on all children-irrespective of infection,” says Emma Duncan, a professor of clinical endocrinology at King’s College London, who worked on the study. But it is also possible that the prolonged symptoms could have been caused by the pandemic’s societal effects. The authors speculated that the children in the negative cohort were suffering from other respiratory viruses for which they had not been tested. When the team compared children who felt unwell at the four-week mark (chosen because numbers were still high enough to make robust statistical comparisons), they found that those who had tested negative for COVID actually felt worse and reported more symptoms than those who had tested positive. Additionally, 98.2 percent of symptomatic children recovered by eight weeks-providing reassurance that the rate of prolonged symptoms from COVID in kids is low. It found that the kids who tested positive typically felt better after six days. The team looked at 1,734 children who had tested positive for COVID at any point and the same number of children who tested negative between September 2020 and February 2021. study published in August 2021 in the Lancet Child & Adolescent Health. One of the first studies to include a control group was a large U.K. In short, do COVID sufferers actually endure more nagging symptoms than COVID evaders? This has allowed experts to compare children who have had COVID with those who have never been diagnosed with it-and assess whether those infected with SARS-CoV-2 experience symptoms that go beyond what uninfected people experience. To account for this confounding factor, recent studies have included control groups. Complicating matters, long COVID is a catchall phrase that includes several common symptoms-from fatigue to depression to headaches-that many people experience on a regular basis, regardless of whether they have ever had a COVID infection. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention defines long COVID as symptoms that begin merely four weeks after infection. Currently the World Health Organization (WHO) describes it as persistent or fluctuating symptoms following an infection with SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID, that last for at least two months. One major challenge is that long COVID is poorly defined. “The methodological limitations of those studies were significant and not fitting with what we were seeing clinically.” “I never took the original studies at their face value,” says Stephen Freedman, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Calgary in Alberta. But some experts say that the early reports included several biases.
Studies at the beginning of the pandemic reported alarming numbers: one review suggested long COVID could impact as many as 66 percent of children. Now a consensus is emerging that long COVID in children is a real risk but a significantly smaller one than some earlier research indicated.Įarly fears were justified. But just how often are children affected? Conflicting and evolving messages can leave a parent both terrified and wildly confused. Long COVID-the constellation of symptoms that can persist long after an initial coronavirus infection-has been a source of fear among parents throughout the pandemic.
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