A growing body of evidence suggests that children have a more robust initial immune response to COVID-19 and can clear the infection quickly
, including by Kerstin Meyer, a cellular geneticist at the Wellcome Sanger Institute in Hinxton, UK, have shown that children mount a stronger and faster response to an infection, and that the innate immune system has an important role in that response. The younger the child, the more likely it is that their innate immune system is driving that response, says Meyer.
But Paul Licciardi, an immunologist at Murdoch Children’s Research Institute in Melbourne and co-author of the Australian study, says that when he and his team looked at innate immune cells in a small group of children, they didn’t find a stronger response in those who didn’t produce antibodies. This is something to look into, he says.
The Australian team also measured some participants’ levels of immune cells in the blood. They found lower levels of certain classes of antibody-producing memory B cells and memory T cells in children than in adults. This suggests that kids mount less of an adaptive immune response, which is more targeted and generates immune memory, says Betsy Herold, a paediatric infectious-disease physician at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City.
The Australian study also looked only at people who were infected with early variants of SARS-CoV-2, but the results might differ for the more-infectious Delta and Omicron variants. In preliminary analyses of people infected with Delta in 2021, Licciardi says he and his team found that most children and adults produced antibodies in response to an infection, which could be because Delta is associated with higher viral loads.
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