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Letter
Implications of a highly transmissible variant of SARS-CoV-2 for children
  1. Oliver Ratmann1,
  2. Samir Bhatt1,2,
  3. Seth Flaxman1
  1. 1 Department of Mathematics, Imperial College London, London, UK
  2. 2 Department of Public Health, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark
  1. Correspondence to Dr Oliver Ratmann, Imperial College London, London SW7 2AZ, UK; oliver.ratmann{at}imperial.ac.uk

https://doi.org/10.1136/archdischild-2021-321903

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    Viner and colleagues1 reviewed data on SARS-CoV-2 transmission involving school-age children, found no evidence that children are more likely to transmit SARS-CoV-2 than adults and suggested that children are likely the safer population group among which social distancing measures could be relaxed. We reconstructed the age groups that sustain resurgent COVID-19 in the USA by combining mobility data of >10 million individuals, age-specific COVID-19 attributable death data and school case data, and came to consistent conclusions.2 In autumn 2020, after in-person schooling or hybrid models resumed in most US school districts,3 our analyses indicate the reproduction number (R) from children and teens was well below 1 at the population level, and that children aged 0–9 years contributed less than …

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    Footnotes

    • Contributors OR conceptualised the study, performed the analyses, drafted the initial manuscript, and reviewed and revised the manuscript. SB and SF contributed to analyses, and reviewed and revised the manuscript.

    • Funding SF is supported by the Imperial College COVID-19 Research Fund and EPSRC (EP/V002910/1).

    • Competing interests None declared.

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