How COVID-19 affects children

How worried should parents be?

A child.
(Image credit: Illustrated | Getty Images, iStock)

Remember the good old days of February 2020, when the biggest challenges facing the average parent were screen time and sibling squabbles? Well, they're long gone. Parenting in the time of COVID-19 involves saying "Have you washed your hands?" on repeat, tying their (clean) hands behind their backs to stop them touching their faces all the time, and trying to explain what a global pandemic is without freaking them (and yourself) out.

If you're worried about your kids getting the coronavirus, that's completely normal. This is unchartered territory for all of us. But the information available so far indicates that COVID-19 appears to primarily affect adults, says pediatrician Mahmoud Loghman-Adham, M.D., who is a principal at California-based life sciences consulting firm Innopiphany. "Children under 19 years represented only about 2.1 percent of cases reported from China, [the early epicenter of the outbreak]," Loghman-Adham adds. His view? "Parents shouldn't be unduly concerned about their children contracting this disease."

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Claire Gillespie

Claire Gillespie is a freelance writer with bylines on Health, SELF, Refinery29, Glamour, The Washington Post, and many more. She likes to write about parenting, health, and culture. She lives in Scotland with her husband and six kids, where she uses every (rare) spare moment to work on her novel.