The authors of a new study conducted by researchers from Massachusetts General Hospital and Mass General Hospital for Children are claiming that their research shows that children may play a much larger role in the spread of coronavirus than previously thought, The Guardian reports.
The study found that children hospitalized with Covid-19 had a significantly higher viral load than hospitalized adults.
However, the results of the study have been disputed, with a UK professor noting that the research only looked at symptomatic children in a hospital setting, and that it did not examine actual transmission at all. In addition, 77% of the infected children in the study contracted the virus from their parents. Furthermore, viral load appears not to be the only factor in transmission, with many other factors incompletely understood and unaccounted for in this study.