Roberta DeBiasi, chief of infectious disease for the hospital, knew she couldn’t conclude anything from one case. But it set off alarm bells. And as the researchers delved further into the mystery, they found evidence that a variant with a mutation called N679S may be circulating in the Mid-Atlantic region.
No one knows whether the infant, who was seen in September and has since recovered, represents a chance case, a sign of things to come, or worrisome changes already in motion as new, more transmissible variants race across the Earth.
“It could be a complete coincidence,” DeBiasi said. “But the association is pretty strong. If you see a patient who has exponentially more virus and it’s a completely different variant, it is probably related.”
Jeremy Luban, a virologist at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, said the viral load in the infant’s nose “in itself, is shocking and noteworthy.” However, he was cautious in speculating that it “could be because of N679S, or simply because it is a [newborn] with an immature immune system, permitting the virus to replicate out of control.”
As the world heads into a new stage of the pandemic where the virus is changing in significant ways, the United States has been so behind in tracking new variants that it’s difficult to understand the current threat, much less predict the next one. The White House announced last week that it will invest an additional $200 million into genomic sequencing to help track new variants — making it possible to analyze 25,000 per week. And some experts argue that some of the best bang for our limited genetic testing buck could come from focusing more on children, who could act as harbingers of more infectious strains because they are generally more resistant to the virus.
Until then, findings like the one from Children’s National remain single puzzle pieces that may be important in determining the direction of the pandemic — or merely transient scientific curiosities.
The question of the new variants’ effect on children is especially important the nation’s top health authority has declared that it is largely safe to reopen schools even as school systems in countries besieged by the United Kingdom variant have closed.
Kids in general do not get sick from the coronavirus the way adults do. The rate of severe illness is low, and about 270 children have died from covid-19, the disease caused by the virus, or an associated illness in a sea of 500,000 U.S. deaths. It is still not known why. It could be something about the biology of youth, some scientists have said, or perhaps a higher likelihood of being exposed to a similar pathogen more recently.
There’s no evidence that the variant with N679S, or others from the United Kingdom, South Africa and Brazil, are more dangerous to children. But health officials in the United Kingdom have said they are monitoring an unusual surge in infections, especially among children ages 6 to 9, that is disproportionate to their share of the population. In Italy, officials have been puzzled by a spike in cases in the northern town of Corzano among those in elementary school and even younger.
And according to a Feb. 9 report in the medical journal the BMJ, Israel also has experienced “a sharp rise in covid-19 infections among young people, with more than 50,000 children and teens testing positive in January — more than Israel saw in any month during the first and second waves.”
In the United States, doctors at several major medical centers reported a holiday surge in hospitalizations of children that paralleled what happened in adults, and a January and February spike in cases of MIS-C — a rare but potentially fatal post-viral syndrome associated with covid-19 that occurs four to six weeks after a coronavirus infection.
Those increases are in line with what would be expected given the waves of community spread of the virus nationwide. But at Children’s National, DeBiasi…
Read More: New covid variant in baby with high viral load puzzles researchers