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Why UK Scientists fear New COVID-19 mutant virus may easily infect children.

By on December 23, 2020

Up until now, researchers believed children under the age of 12 are less likely to catch the new coronavirus than adults. However, the latest findings by researchers from the UK government’s New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group (NERVTAG) monitoring the highly contagious mutant strain, shows that the way the mutant strain behaves could infect children more easily than previous viruses.

Peter Horby, a professor of emerging infectious diseases at Oxford University and chair of NERVTAG said, “We now have high confidence that this variant does have a transmission advantage over other virus variants that are currently in the UK.”

“There is a hint that it has a higher propensity to infect children,” said Neil Ferguson, a professor and infectious disease epidemiologist at Imperial College London and also a member of NERVTAG.

“We haven’t established any sort of causality on that, but we can see it in the data,” said Ferguson adding that “we will need to gather more data to see how it behaves going forward.”

Coronavirus penetrates human cells (ACE2) as spike proteins bind to receptors. So far, the medical community has analyzed that children have fewer receptors than adults and are less likely to get infected. However, it was estimated that children are as susceptible as adults because the mutant virus binds well to the receptor regardless of the number.

In order to stop this mutant virus with a maximum transmission power of 70% higher than conventional viruses, the number of countries that have banned UK arrivals has now increased to more than 40. The European Union (EU) has decided to discuss a joint response to the mutant virus. Japan has also stepped up its border control measures based on the findings released by the British authorities.

However, the World Health Organization (WHO) believes that the new variant has not yet spread out of control. WHO’s emergency response team leader Michael Ryan said at a press conference on the 21st, “We need to do what we have been doing, we may just have to do it with a little more intensity and for a little longer to make sure we can bring this virus under control.”

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