Breathing in the Time of a Pandemic

I’ve been thinking a lot about the novel coronavirus and its illness, COVID-19, and the fact that it generally does not seem to be such a severe illness for children. That fact is unusual. We generally worry about children becoming more ill with a new virus because they have not encountered it before. The seemingly continuous “six-month-cold” that virtually every child gets when she begins school or daycare is really the repeated process of working through one infection after another. There is a whole repertoire of respiratory viruses they have never met before. With each illness process immunity builds, and in time, the inflammatory reaction becomes brisker and the child more resilient. As adults, we are surely exposed to those same viruses and bacteria all the time, but have gained protection, gained “experience” around working with them. We therefore do not have the same repeated symptoms. But meeting the coronavirus seems to be different, almost opposite. No one has existing protection from this virus–that is why it is labelled as “novel”—and yet, young age seems to be of physiologic benefit. There is something about the way younger children get sick that we should pay attention to.