10 Sep Pediatric Study Finds Having Antibodies Should Not Be Considered As Being Immune to COVID-19

Dr. Bahar

MedicalResearch.com Interview with:
Burak Bahar, MD
Children’s National Hospital
Laboratory Medicine Division
Washington DC

MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings?

Response: Objective of this study was to help us better understand how long it takes pediatric patients with COVID-19 to clear it from their system, and at what point they start to make antibodies against the virus.

Main findings of our study were 19.5 days being the median duration of viral positivity which is later than 18 days that is the median time for detecting antibodies in the circulation. We also found that kids aged 6 through 15 had a longer duration of viral positivity which was a median of 32 days.

MedicalResearch.com: What should readers take away from your report?

Response: What we can takeaway here is that we cannot let our guard down just because a child is no longer showing symptoms or because they have antibodies. We must remain diligent about basic infection control measures – that means good hand hygiene, social distancing and wearing a mask.

MedicalResearch.com: What recommendations do you have for future research as a result of this work?

Response: What we don’t know is whether or not that virus is ‘potent’ enough to be transmitted to others if one have both the virus and antibodies at the same time so the next best step would be to check whether these individuals are contagious.

MedicalResearch.com: Is there anything else you would like to add?

Response: Having antibodies should not be considered as being immune to the virus. There are reports of different strains of this virus and re-infection is, theoretically, possible. No disclosures.

Citation:

Burak Bahar, Cyril Jacquot, Yunchuan D. Mo, Roberta L. DeBiasi, Joseph Campos, Meghan Delaney,
Kinetics of viral clearance and antibody production across age groups in SARS-CoV-2 infected children,
The Journal of Pediatrics,2020,
ISSN 0022-3476, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jpeds.2020.08.078. 

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Last Updated on September 10, 2020 by Marie Benz MD FAAD