The sniffles of young children may have protected them from the worst effects of COVID-19 infections, according to a new study published this week in the Journal of Experimental Medicine.
After testing nasal swabs from children who visited the emergency room during the height of the COVID pandemic, researchers discovered that children’s innate immune response to other viruses and bacteria helped to minimize the severity of COVID infection.
While it takes time for the body to develop antibodies to target specific pathogens, the body’s first line of defense against infection, known as the innate immune response, takes over.
Study authors concluded that children had less severe effects of COVID due to their already active innate immune response that was protecting them from other viruses and bacteria. Because children’s innate immune response is more active than adults’, they likely had stronger responses to COVID infections.
“Activation of generalized antiviral defenses in children by other infections may have helped to fight off the initial stages of SARS-CoV-2 infection, leading to less severe outcomes in children compared with adults,” said a press release from the journal’s publisher, Rockefeller University Press.
The team of researchers, led by associate professor at Yale School of Medicine Ellen Foxman, tested over 600 nasal swabs from children for a host of viruses and bacteria, not just for COVID.
Roughly half of the samples from children under age 5 had respiratory infections other than COVID.
Samples were also collected from 1-year-olds in their routine well-child checkup and two-week follow-ups. Comparisons showed that more than half tested positive for a respiratory virus during one of their two visits, meaning that they either had gotten or recovered from an infection within that short time period.
Although the innate immune response in children is not continuously active, the findings suggest that it is more often activated because children are more easily infected with relatively harmless respiratory bugs. This may be because children do not have the benefit of having developed antibodies from prior exposure.
This worked to their advantage when exposed to COVID, however, because even adults did not have antibody protection against the novel virus.
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According to the American Academy of Pediatrics, approximately 234,000 children under age 18 were hospitalized with confirmed cases of COVID from fall 2020 to spring 2024. This peaked to over 6,500 hospital admissions in one week during the omicron surge in January 2022.
By spring 2024, there were as low as 310 hospital admissions of children with confirmed cases of COVID.
