COVID-19 outbreak at a kids’ summer camp may be stark warning

A recent report about the closure of an overnight summer camp following a large outbreak of COVID-19 raises questions about the extent to which children contribute to the spread of the new coronavirus.

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As summer break draws to a close for many individuals in the Northern hemisphere, the question that remains on people’s minds is: To what extent can children contribute to the spread of the new coronavirus?

The evidence so far has been mixed.

A recent study in the journal JAMA Pediatrics compared the levels of viral RNA from swab tests and found that children aged 5 years and older have about the same amount of viral RNA as people over the age of 18.

Importantly, the authors also saw that children younger than 5 had even greater levels of viral RNA. They suggest that “young children can potentially be important drivers of SARS-CoV-2 spread in the general population.” However, they do admit that their study did not look at infectious virus.

On the other hand, a rapid review by the National Collaborating Centre for Methods and Tools at McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada, concluded that “young children are not a major source of transmission.”

When children did acquire the virus, the source was more likely to be community spread or an adult in the same household, rather than transmission from one child to another. The authors state that the quality of this evidence is moderate.

That said, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released a report last week about an outbreak that forced an overnight camp in Georgia to close at the end of June.

Within 2 days of the camp opening at the end of June, a teenage staff member began showing symptoms of COVID-19. They received a positive SARS-CoV-2 test result the following day.

On the same day, camp officials started sending the campers (the youngest of whom were 6 years old) home. They closed the camp 3 days later.

The Georgia Department of Public Health