Infectivity of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 in children compared with adults
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
<h3>BACKGROUND:</h3> The role of children in the transmission and community spread of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) is unclear. We aimed to quantify the infectivity of SARS-CoV-2 in nasopharyngeal samples from children compared with adults. <h3>METHODS:</h3> We obtained nasopharyngeal swabs from adult and pediatric cases of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) and from their contacts who tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 in Manitoba between March and December 2020. We compared viral growth in cell culture, cycle threshold values from the reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) of the SARS-CoV-2 envelope (E) gene and the 50% tissue culture infective dose (TCID<sub>50</sub>/mL) between adults and children. <h3>RESULTS:</h3> Among 305 samples positive for SARS-CoV-2 by RT-PCR, 97 samples were from children aged 10 years or younger, 78 were from children aged 11–17 years and 130 were from adults (≥ 18 yr). Viral growth in culture was present in 31% of samples, including 18 (19%) samples from children 10 years or younger, 18 (23%) from children aged 11–17 years and 57 (44%) from adults (children v. adults, odds ratio 0.45, 95% confidence interval [CI] 0.28–0.72). The cycle threshold was 25.1 (95% CI 17.7–31.3) in children 10 years or younger, 22.2 (95% CI 18.3–29.0) in children aged 11–17 years and 18.7 (95% CI 17.9–30.4) in adults (<i>p</i> < 0.001). The median TCID<sub>50</sub>/mL was significantly lower in children aged 11–17 years (316, interquartile range [IQR] 178–2125) than adults (5620, IQR 1171 to 17 800, <i>p</i> < 0.001). Cycle threshold was an accurate predictor of positive culture in both children and adults (area under the receiver-operator curve, 0.87, 95% CI 0.81–0.93 v. 0.89, 95% CI 0.83–0.96, <i>p</i> = 0.6). <h3>INTERPRETATION:</h3> Compared with adults, children with nasopharyngeal swabs that tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 were less likely to grow virus in culture, and had higher cycle thresholds and lower viral concentrations, suggesting that children are not the main drivers of SARS-CoV-2 transmission.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it