Health Information and Quality Authority, Dublin, Ireland.
Department of General Practice, RCSI University of Medicine and Health Sciences, Dublin, Ireland.
Euro Surveill. 2022 Feb;27(5). doi: 10.2807/1560-7917.ES.2022.27.5.2001651.
BackgroundThe role of children in the transmission of SARS-CoV-2 during the early pandemic was unclear.AimWe aimed to review studies on the transmission of SARS-CoV-2 by children during the early pandemic.MethodsWe searched MEDLINE, Embase, the Cochrane Library, Europe PubMed Central and the preprint servers medRxiv and bioRxiv from 30 December 2019 to 10 August 2020. We assessed the quality of included studies using a series of questions adapted from related tools. We provide a narrative synthesis of the results.ResultsWe identified 28 studies from 17 countries. Ten of 19 studies on household and close contact transmission reported low rates of child-to-adult or child-to-child transmission. Six studies investigated transmission of SARS-CoV-2 in educational settings, with three studies reporting 183 cases from 14,003 close contacts who may have contracted COVID-19 from children index cases at their schools. Three mathematical modelling studies estimated that children were less likely to infect others than adults. All studies were of low to moderate quality.ConclusionsDuring the early pandemic, it appeared that children were not substantially contributing to household transmission of SARS-CoV-2. School-based studies indicated that transmission rates in this setting were low. Large-scale studies of transmission chains using data collected from contact tracing and serological studies detecting past evidence of infection would be needed to verify our findings.
在疫情早期，儿童在 SARS-CoV-2 传播中的作用尚不清楚。
我们旨在回顾疫情早期儿童传播 SARS-CoV-2 的研究。
我们从 2019 年 12 月 30 日至 2020 年 8 月 10 日，检索了 MEDLINE、Embase、Cochrane 图书馆、欧洲 PubMed 中心以及预印本服务器 medRxiv 和 bioRxiv，以评估纳入研究的质量。我们使用改编自相关工具的一系列问题对纳入的研究进行了评估。我们对结果进行了叙述性综合。
我们从 17 个国家中确定了 28 项研究。19 项家庭和密切接触传播研究中有 10 项报告了儿童向成人或儿童向儿童传播的低比率。6 项研究调查了 SARS-CoV-2 在教育环境中的传播，其中 3 项研究报告了 183 例从 14003 名密切接触者中可能从学校儿童病例中感染 COVID-19 的病例。3 项数学建模研究估计儿童感染他人的可能性小于成人。所有研究的质量均为低或中。
在疫情早期，儿童似乎并未对 SARS-CoV-2 的家庭传播做出重大贡献。基于学校的研究表明，这种环境中的传播率较低。需要使用来自接触者追踪和血清学研究的数据进行大规模的传播链研究，以检测过去感染的证据，以验证我们的发现。
