Although the risk of long COVID is not insignificant, it is much lower than previously thought
Long COVID—the constellation of symptoms that can persist long after an initial coronavirus infection—has been a source of fear among parents throughout the pandemic. But just how often are children affected? Conflicting and evolving messages can leave a parent both terrified and wildly confused. Now a consensus is emerging that long COVID in children is a real risk but a significantly smaller one than some earlier research indicated.
One of the first studies to include a control group was a large U.K. study published in August 2021 in the Lancet Child & Adolescent Health. The team looked at 1,734 children who had tested positive for COVID at any point and the same number of children who tested negative between September 2020 and February 2021. It found that the kids who tested positive typically felt better after six days. Additionally, 98.
One possibility is that the uninfected children were struggling emotionally—which could bubble up as physical ailments. Physical and mental health are often intertwined: for example, depression can manifest as fatigue, and both are common symptoms of long COVID. The team also assessed the older children’s psychological and social symptoms, only to find that those in the control group felt more scared, had more difficulty sleeping and felt more worried than those in the COVID group.
The welcome news, however, does not negate the fact that debilitating COVID symptoms can persist for months in a small percentage of children, likely because of lingering effects of infection and the body’s immune response to it. Even if only a small percentage of children develop long COVID, the sheer number of those who are being infected with SARS-CoV-2 means a significant amount of children are suffering.
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