Children’s high susceptibility to new coronavirus variant in UK still being studied, DOH says

The Department of Health (DOH) on Monday said the speculation that children are more susceptible to the new variant of SARS-CoV-2 in the United Kingdom is still being studied.

Interviewed on GMA Network’s Unang Hirit, DOH Undersecretary Maria Rosario Vergeire said no sufficient evidence has been presented yet to make such a conclusion.

“Pinag-aaralan pa ang mga bagay na 'yan. Wala pang sufficient evidence na ito'y mangyayari kung sakaling papasok sa ating bansa,” she said.

“Ang mga bata naman po ay considered as vulnerable sector ng populasyon at ating binabantayan,” she added.

Vergeire noted that President Rodrigo Duterte postponed the dry run of face-to-face classes because the Philippine government has been considering children as part of the vulnerable sector.

“Gusto natin na maging sigurado muna tayo na wala masyadong maapektuhan kapag nakapasok ang variant na 'to,” she said.

As reported by Reuters, a member of UK government’s government’s New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group (NERV-TAG) said that “there is a hint that it has a higher propensity to infect children.”

“We haven’t established any sort of causality on that, but we can see it in the data,” NERV-TAG’s Neil Ferguson said.

“We will need to gather more data to see how it behaves going forward,” added Ferguson, who is also a professor and infectious disease epidemiologist at Imperial College London.

On Saturday, Duterte approved the extension of the travel ban from the UK, including those that transited from the UK, for another two weeks amid the new variant.

The UK travel ban started on December 24, 2020 at 12:01 a.m. and was initially set to end on December 31, 2020. —KG, GMA News