As the coronavirus pandemic spreads, a handful of young patients have died in recent days. A six-week-old baby died on Wednesday in the United States, while three adolescents aged 12, 13 and 19 died at the start of the week in Belgium and England. But how can these deaths be explained, when young people are clearly less affected by the disease than adults? Scientists have already started to look into the matter and are studying the path of a genetic predisposition.
>> PODCAST - Coronavirus: find all the answers to your questions here
"A genetic predisposition" which is revealed during infection
What if these young patients had a particular genetic vulnerability to the coronavirus? This is what researchers from around the world are asking right now, including a French laboratory at the Imagine Institute, which is run by Jean-Laurent Casanova.
LIVE - Coronavirus: follow the situation Thursday, April 2
"The assumption is that they may have some form of genetic predisposition to this disease which is revealed during infection with the virus. It is silent until the virus appears", judges the professor of pediatrics at Necker, who has just been appointed to the Scientific Council created at the start of the epidemic.
CORONAVIRUS ESSENTIALS
> Paid leave, RTT, sick leave: what changes the state of health emergency
> What do we know about chloroquine, the treatment that is debating?
> What to do if you are sick, but not coronavirus?
> Why you will have to be patient to be reimbursed for a canceled trip
> Homemade bread, short circuits ... Our solutions to continue to eat well during confinement
> Sex: how to manage abstinence during confinement?
Sequencing the genome of young patients
It would not be the first time that a virus or bacteria has shown a genetic disease. Since the 1980s, the scientific literature has identified more than 400. To prove this, researchers are therefore working hard to sequence the genome of young patients with Covid-19. Like investigators, they track down the slightest variation in DNA that would explain this mystery.