‘Best Time To Get COVID’: Top Scientist Asks Parents Not To Worry About Children; Know Why

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New Delhi: With Delhi seeing an uptick in COVID-19 cases recording 366 cases in the last 24 hours, top biomedical scientist Dr Gagandeep Kang urged parents not to worry.

“I think if you have to get COVID the best time to get it is when you are a healthy child. Children who are infected do not manifest with symptoms in the majority…Recent sero surveys indicate 80 per cent children have already been infected. We should not expect protection from infection. As the virus evolves, it is going to continue to evolve in ways that allow it to infect us again and again and again…This is particularly true for children,” she told NDTV.

“So the data that parents should be looking at is really not about the cases, or about the number of children who were detected to have infection, or about children who have had mild symptoms. It should really be among the infected children how many wound up needing hospitalisation. And we will see that those numbers are very, very few,” she said.

On whether the XE variant is driving the rise in cases, Dr Kang said, “We don’t necessarily know that all of the cases that are being reported are of the XE variant unless we sequence them all.”

“XE is a derivative of Omicron. In terms of what we know about Omicron, this is a virus that replicates more on the upper respiratory tract than in the lower respiratory tract, so the symptoms you would expect to see would be infection of the upper respiratory tract by and large, fever, restlessness, but not the kind of severe disease that put people to hospitals earlier,” she said.