According to a study, children with Covid 19 symptoms are healthy again on average after six days.
This is what British researchers report after a study in the specialist magazine "The Lancet Child & Adolescent Health".
According to their own information, the authors, who are researching at King's College in London, among other things, are providing a first broad-based study that enables findings to be made on children who are symptomatically ill with Covid-19.
The basis of the investigation were the symptoms registered by parents or other guardians, which were reported via an app after a positive test. The analysis included the disease progression of 1,734 children between the ages of 5 and 17 who tested positive for the coronavirus and showed symptoms of the disease. On average, the sick children had three symptoms - the most common were fatigue, headache and the loss of taste or smell.
It was rare for children to show symptoms for four weeks or longer after their infection - in the study, this was the case in 4.4 percent. After eight weeks, fewer than 2 percent of the children were still experiencing symptoms. "It is reassuring that the number of children who have long suffered from Covid-19 symptoms is very low," lead author Emma Duncan is quoted in a "Lancet" release.
Older people were ill a little longer - an average of seven days - than the five to eleven year olds, in whom the symptoms lasted an average of five days.
The proportion of those adolescents who still felt symptoms after more than four weeks, at 5.1 percent, was slightly higher among the older than among the younger ones (3.1 percent).
The authors admit that the weakness of their study was that the symptoms could not be checked or compared.
Thus, the parents' subjective assessment plays a major role.
The investigation period ran until the end of February.
It is therefore unclear whether the results can be transferred to the delta variant of the coronavirus.
This was first discovered in India and only spread from Great Britain over Europe from the spring.