COVID-19 Research Paper Volume 13, Issue 16 pp 19954—19962
COVID-19 mortality rate in children is U-shaped
- 1 Buckingham Browne and Nichols School, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA
- 2 Division of Genetics, Department of Medicine, Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA 02115, USA
- 3 Biotein, Wellesley, MA 02482, USA
Received: April 4, 2021 Accepted: August 9, 2021 Published: August 18, 2021
https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.203442How to Cite
Copyright: © 2021 Khera et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Abstract
Children are known to be better protected from COVID-19 than adults, but their susceptibility patterns and the risk relative to other diseases are insufficiently defined. Here, we found that the COVID-19 mortality rate is U-shaped in childhood: it initially decreases, reaching the minimum at the ages 3-10 years, and then increases throughout life. All-cause mortality and mortality from other diseases, such as pneumonia and influenza, show a similar pattern; however, childhood mortality rates from COVID-19 are considerably lower than from other diseases, with the best relative protection achieved at the youngest ages. Consistent with this, the fraction of COVID-19 deaths among all deaths increases as a function of age throughout childhood and the entire life. We discuss implications of the elevated postnatal COVID-19 risk and lower childhood COVID-19 mortality compared to other diseases.