Scientist dismisses Covid-19 concern for kids amid case spike in Delhi-NCR

Amid a recent spike in cases in Delhi and the surrounding National Capital Region, experts have called for parents to dismiss concerns over sending their children to school.

"I think if you have to get a Covid infection the best time to get it is when you are a healthy child. Basically, children who are infected do not manifest with symptoms in the majority...Recent sero surveys indicate 80 per cent of children have already been infected. We should not expect protection from infection," Dr Gagandeep Kang, one of India's top biomedical scientists, told NDTV in an interview.

"As the virus evolves, it is going to continue to evolve in ways that allow it to infect us again and again and again...This is particularly true for children," she was quoted as saying.

She, however, called for immediate vaccination of children aged under 12 with comorbidities.

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She said that parents must not look at the number of infections and instead, look up how many children wound up needing hospitalisation. "And we will see that those numbers are very very few," she was quoted as saying.

She said going by the data at present, it is not advisable to shut educational institutes in a panic.

She said that without more information, it would be incorrect to assume that the XE variant, a subset of Omicron, of Covid-19 is responsible for a spike in the disease.

Kang said that although Omicron replicates more on the upper respiratory tract, it is not correct to make assumptions about a variant based on one's symptoms.

"I think focussing on the symptoms and expecting the symptoms to tell us which variant we have is often a fallacy, even though it is quite frequently what is highlighted in the media. What you really need is clinical demographic information in addition to the sequence data that tell you which variant it is," Dr Kang said.

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