What does the evidence show about children’s ability to transmit the new coronavirus?

There have been conflicting news reports about children’s ability to catch the coronavirus. Although we can’t answer definitively, the overall trend from current evidence suggests that children probably play a limited role in the transmission of the new coronavirus.

However, there remains uncertainty until more widespread testing is done, due to the number of infections where people don’t display symptoms.

Children can contract the new coronavirus and (in rare cases) get a severe Covid-19 illness. In England, there have been over 2000 reported cases in people under 20, and over 1000 cases in people under 10. This is similar to the levels reported in other countries.

That being said, evidence suggests that the rate of infection and severity of illness for children is significantly lower than in adults.

Children may have a limited role in spreading the virus, but we won’t know that for sure until widespread antibody testing studies are complete.

What do the studies show us?

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FACT CHECK

The 1918 pandemic did have a deadly second wave, but not due to quarantine being lifted

A Facebook post, shared thousands of times, has warned against lifting lockdown restrictions, claiming that "most of the fatalities happened in the second wave" of the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic.

The post draws a link between people rejoicing in the streets and a second wave of the virus which killed “tens of millions”.

The Spanish Flu is thought to have killed around 50 million people, and it is true that most of these deaths occurred in the “second wave.”

However, it’s incorrect to say the lifting of quarantine and social distancing measures was what led to the second wave.

The reason why there was a second wave of the flu is still debated, but is usually more associated with broader public health policy failures, and issues related to the war, such as soldiers travelling across Europe.

Some suggest that the virus may have mutated into a deadlier strain between the first and second wave, but this remains uncertain.

What did the post say?

FACT CHECK

Pay for nurses has gone up over the past few years, but is down since 2010

Matt Hancock claimed that nurses’ pay increased last month and suggested that last year some nurses received a pay rise of over 15%.

It is true that pay did increase last month, at the beginning of the new financial year. But it doesn’t appear that any group of “the lowest paid nurses” would have seen their pay increase by as much as 15% over a single year.

We asked the Department for Health and Social Care for clarity but it did not confirm to us specifically where the figure came from.

Contextualising these claims over the past decade there have been real terms (i.e. adjusted for inflation) increases in nursing pay in recent years - but these haven’t counterbalanced real terms decreases which happened over the early and mid-2010s.

Since the year ending August 2010, when the NHS started publishing these statistics, average nurse pay has fallen by 7.4% in real terms.

The Health Secretary specifically mentioned nurses just starting their career, whose pay is currently £24,907 a year. In real terms, it is true this is up 6.7% since 2017/18. But this is down 3.2% since 2010/11.

Nurse pay in context

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Episode 6 of our podcast is here!

On this week's podcast we take a deep dive into the 1918 pandemic. What can the Spanish Flu teach us about the new coronavirus?

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