How does the virus infect children? And should they be in school?

The evidence shows that children are far less likely to get gravely ill with COVID-19, and the death rate among children is very low.

According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 1.7% of 150,000 American COVID-19 cases affected people under the age of 18. Globally the amount of children with COVID-19 is under 2% of all cases, from Korea to Spain to Italy.

The question that brings more scepticism to the table is that can children transmit the disease. The general consensus is that like adults children can transmit the disease, but recent studies conducted all over the world seems to contradict with this idea.

in 29th April Daily Telegraph, reported that there has not been a single reported instance of a child under 10 transmitting the virus, even in contact tracing carried out by WHO.

In a large review of 78 available studies conducted by the UK Royal College of Paediatrics, which said: "The role of children in the transmission is unclear, but it seems likely they do not play a significant role." And Kari Stefansson, CEO of the Icelandic company deCODE genetics in Reykjavík, [studied the spread of COVID-19 in Iceland with Iceland’s Directorate of Health and the National University Hospital. His project has tested 36,500 people; as of this writing, Iceland has 1,802 cases and ten deaths. On a per-capita basis, Iceland ranks top of the world in testing.

In an interview with the Science Museum Group, Stefansson makes an extraordinary statement:

Children under 10 are less likely to get infected than adults and if they get infected, they are less likely to get seriously ill. What is interesting is that even if children do get infected, they are less likely to transmit the disease to others than adults. We have not found a single instance of a child infected parents.

Even though the above studies say children less likely to transmit the virus experts warn there is nowhere near enough evidence to feel confident that children don't spread the virus.

So far, only a few countries have taken the plunge of reopening schools. Norway and Denmark were two of the early countries to open the schools they did so in last month, and France has restarted some schools this week. Britain’s prime minister, Boris Johnson, has said that England’s primary schools would start to open sometime in June.