When parents ask pediatric infectious disease specialist Dr. Amy Edwards how they can keep their little ones Covid-19 free, she says it’s simple.
“Vaccinate everyone around you and that will protect your child very well,” said Edwards, associate medical director for pediatric infection control at Rainbow Babies and Children University Hospital in Cleveland, United States. “It’s not complete protection, but it’s better protection.”
Last week, the US surpassed 1 million new Covid-19 cases among children for the first time since the American Academy of Pediatrics began tracking, the group said Tuesday, and the numbers are now nearly five times the rate. from the peak of the outbreak last winter. But children under age 5 are still not eligible for Covid-19 vaccines in the United States.
However, there is new evidence that they can get significant protection against the coronavirus if everyone around them is vaccinated.
Two new studies in Israel have found that vaccinating everyone in a household reduces transmission of the virus that causes Covid-19. The studies were published in the journal Science on Thursday.
One study looked at the period between January and March 2021, when the Alpha variant of the coronavirus was in wide circulation, and between July and September 2021, when the Delta variant surpassed the spread in Israel. During the first period, no children in Israel were eligible to receive the vaccine. In the second period, only children aged 12 years and over were eligible.
The researchers found that children who lived in a household with a single vaccinated person had a 26% lower risk of catching Covid-19 in early 2021. Having a vaccinated person still provided protection when the Delta variant was in wide circulation, but that was not the case. decreased to 20.8%.
If the child lived in a home where two of the caregivers were vaccinated, they would have a significantly reduced risk of catching Covid-19. During the part of the pandemic when the Alpha variant was in circulation, children living with two vaccinated people had a 71.7% reduction in risk. With Delta, the risk of catching the disease was reduced by 58.1%.
“Parental vaccination provides substantial protection at home for unvaccinated children,” said the researchers, who worked at Harvard University, Clalit Research Institute, Ben Gurion University, Tel Aviv University and Boston Children’s Hospital.
Another study analyzed the transmission rate among household contacts and reinforced the case for indirect protection from vaccines.
The researchers found that prior to the Delta variant, people who received the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine and still contracted the disease had slightly reduced infectivity compared to those who got sick and had not been vaccinated.
Researchers at Yale University and the Maccabi Institute for Research and Innovation analyzed families who were immunized with the Pfizer vaccine before and after the Delta variant was in wide circulation.
Total vaccine efficacy was estimated to be 91.8% between 10 and 90 days after vaccination and 61.1% more than three months after the second dose. There was evidence that protection diminished after this time period, and the study did not take booster doses into account.
When the Delta variant became dominant, the effectiveness of the Pfizer vaccine dropped to 65.6% between 10 and 90 days and 24.2% over three months after the second dose.
But even with the decline in efficacy, when the researchers looked at the risk for children in these families, they found a “greater reduction in risk for children exposed to a vaccinated versus an unvaccinated infected member, regardless of which variant was in circulation.” said the study.
It is indoors where many cases begin, the study suggests. Other studies have suggested the same. The risk of transmission from an infected family member was 100 times greater than the average risk of contracting infection from the community.
There was no significant increase in home transmission when Delta was in circulation. Children, however, had a lower risk of infection from both the community and an infected family member, and sick children themselves were slightly less infectious than adults.
“We’ve always known that children are not the main transmitters of this virus,” said Edwards, who is not involved in the new studies. “Adults have always been the main transmitters of this virus, which is why it is incumbent on us, as adults, to be vaccinated, to wear masks and to take care, because we are primarily responsible for these outbreaks. We are the ones who can keep them safe.”
Source: CNN Brasil
