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Addendum to: Children are not COVID-19 super spreaders: time to go back to school
  1. Alasdair Peter Stuart Munro1,2,
  2. Saul N Faust1,2
  1. 1 Faculty of Medicine and Institute for Life Sciences, University of Southampton, Southampton, Hampshire, UK
  2. 2 NIHR Southampton Clinical Research Facility and NIHR Southampton Biomedical Research Centre, University Hospital Southampton NHS Foundation Trust, Southampton, Hampshire, UK
  1. Correspondence to Dr Alasdair Peter Stuart Munro, NIHR Southampton Clinical Research Facility and NIHR Southampton Biomedical Research Centre, University Hospital Southampton NHS Foundation Trust, Southampton, Hampshire, UK; a.munro{at}soton.ac.uk

http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/archdischild-2020-319908

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    Since publication of our original article,1 additional evidence has come to light providing further support for our viewpoint. Several high-quality studies of contact tracing (including household transmission) have demonstrated a significantly lower attack rate in children than adults,2 3 including in New York state and Israel where all household members had nasopharyngeal swabs tested with rt-PCR regardless of symptoms. Children were infected at around half the rate of adults within the same household. 4 5 A household contact study from The Netherlands using serology in addition to rt-PCR showed similar findings.6 Suggestions that children in these studies have been protected from transmission by school closures do not appreciate that a significant proportion of community transmission occurred prior to the closing of schools, after which a large burden of transmission was within households, from which children would not be shielded. This would not affect relative household contact attack rates. Further data from Iceland7 (where …

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    Footnotes

    • Twitter @apsmunro

    • Funding The authors have not declared a specific grant for this research from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.

    • Competing interests None declared.

    • Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; internally peer reviewed.