Virus killed 20 healthy youths early in pandemic

Majority of those under age of 20 who lost their life after catching coronavirus had underlying conditions

TWENTY children and teenagers with no pre-existing health conditions died of Covid in the first two years of the pandemic, analysis shows.

Data obtained by health authorities found that, between March 2020 and December 2021, 185 people under the age of 20 died within 100 days of catching Covid.

A review found that more than half were not as a result of Covid, with the virus the underlying cause of death in 81 of the cases.

Of these, 61 were children with serious underlying health conditions, such as severe neurodisability and immunocompromising conditions.

The study’s co-author, Prof Shamez Ladhani, a paediatric infectious diseases specialist who is also consultant epidemiologist at the UK Health Security Agency, said the work showed “Sars-cov-2 continues to remain a very rare cause of death in children”.

The researchers looked at all deaths of people under 20 years of age who died within 100 days of catching Covid. Half of the deaths occurred within a week of infection, and the majority within a month.

The research is the first of its kind to draw on various national databases and gathered large amounts of information on each child who died of Covid in England during the pandemic.

“The strength that we have is that we have access to numerous databases at a national level and we also questioned the clinicians involved,” Prof Ladhani said.

“We talked to the GPS, we talked to the hospital doctors... whatever information we could gather to ascertain whether the cause of death was Covid or not. This was very resource-intensive but because there were so few fatalities in children, we were able to collect all the information we needed for every child that died within 100 days of their positive test.”

Data show that the Covid Infection Fatality Rate (IFR) – the likelihood of a person dying after infection – is just 0.7 per 100,000, or 0.0007 per cent, in children. However, this varied by variant, with delta having an IFR of 0.6 per 100,000 infections, compared with 1.0 for the original Wuhan strain.

“Every time a new variant came along, there was so much concern that the new variant would be more severe and more fatal, but it just hasn’t turned out to be true for any variants,” Prof Ladhani said.

“In fact, emerging data suggest that the omicron variant is even less fatal in children compared to previous variants.”

‘This research shows that Covid continues to remain a very rare cause of death in teenagers and children’

Three quarters of the children who died from Covid were individuals who were extremely vulnerable, usually with serious and life-limiting conditions, and in non-pandemic years may have died from other infections.

“Many of the children who die of Covid are very, very vulnerable and very serious underlying conditions and life-limiting conditions, such as severe neurodisability,” Prof Ladhani said.

“It is really sad that they get Covid and then succumb to the infection but these children, in any other time, would have been vulnerable to many other illnesses and infections.

“What that means is that it is even more important that we prioritise protection for children with underlying health conditions through vaccination, not only against Covid-19 but also other infections such as the flu and all other routine childhood immunisations.”