Children are unlikely to have been the primary source of household SARS-CoV-2 infections

Yanshan Zhu; Conor J Bloxham; Katina D Hulme; Jane E Sinclair; Zhen Wei Marcus Tong; Lauren E Steele; Ellesandra C Noye; Jiahai Lu; Keng Yih Chew; Janessa Pickering; Charles Gilks; Asha C Bowen; Kirsty R Short

Asymptomatic infections experienced by children infected with SARS-CoV-2 could have important implications for transmission. Specifically, a number of asymptomatic or mild paediatric cases could result in children driving the intra-household transmission of SARS-CoV-2. 8 To investigate this hypothesis, we examined the available published data on SARS-CoV-2 household transmission clusters. A total of 31 household transmission clusters were identified with sufficient information available to include in this analysis (Table 2 ). These cases were drawn from China, Singapore, the USA, Vietnam, and South Korea. Of these transmission clusters, only three (9·7%) were identified as having a paediatric index case (Table 2) . Importantly, these data do not suggest that children are not becoming infected with SARS-CoV-2, as isolated paediatric SARS-CoV-2 infections would not be captured in reports of household transmission (and are indeed shown in Table 1 ). Rather, these data suggest that to date, children have not been the primary source of household SARS-CoV-2 infections.