More than one-third of children who test positive for COVID-19 don't show symptoms: U of A study
Emily Rae Pasiuk | CBC News | Posted: December 3, 2020 12:42 AM | Last Updated: December 3, 2020
Pediatrician says results not surprising
A new study from the University of Alberta found that more than one-third of children who tested positive for COVID-19 were asymptomatic.
Their observational study analyzed results for 2,463 children who were tested between April 13 and Sept. 30.
Of those, 1,987 children had positive results and 476 had negative results. Of those with positive test results, 35.9 per cent reported being asymptomatic.
Dr. Joan Robinson, a pediatric infectious diseases physician at the Stollery Children's hospital, said the results are not surprising. It's possible the children could have developed symptoms after they were tested, but it's also well known that some people run the entire course of a COVID-19 infection without any symptoms at all, said Robinson, who was not a part of the study, published on Nov. 24.
"[This] is why all the current rules are in place," Robinson said during an interview on Edmonton AM. "It's not only the symptomatic people that can spread it to you, it's also people that have no way of knowing they have COVID."
Robinson said she thinks the return to school has actually gone better than "many people thought it would be."
"Children do not appear to be the primary spreaders of this virus," she said. "Even though children are contagious, they appear to spread it to adults maybe less commonly than adults spread it to them."
Robinson acknowledged the reality of in-school transmission but said many children who have tested positive acquired the virus somewhere else.
As for what parents should take away from the study, Robinson said caution is the rule.
"I think parents should be incredibly cautious about how many people they come into contact with to try to prevent themselves from getting COVID, and that includes contact with children other than the ones that live in their household," she said.
"We all have different degrees of anxiety over any given situation, and for some people this really has been horrendous, and it's been a year where they've been living on pins and needles worrying about all kinds of things."