An interesting new paper just came out in PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America). As usual, I won’t try to dive too deep here, but just give you the basic conclusion and let you read further if you want.
The paper (link to the paper here) examined over three million records of adults from a big healthcare provider (Kaiser Permanente Northern California). They grouped these into three categories: those with no kids, kids between 6-18, and those with kids 0-5 years of age. They then looked at infection rates and severity (hospitalization and ICU rates). Group sizes were large enough to have meaningful statistics. One of the biggest limitations was the average age of the adults. Not surprisingly, parents with older kids had a higher median age. (The discussion of how they dealt with this issue is in their paper.)
The basic results are interesting.
Compared to adults who have kids aged 0-5, adults with no kids were
15% LESS likely to get a COVID infection,
but were 49% MORE likely to end up in the hospital
and 76% MORE likely to end up in the ICU.
Again, these were age-adjusted groups, so it is not simply that the ‘no kids’ group was older and therefore more susceptible.
Short summary: being around young children makes you much less likely to get severe forms of COVID.
This has been shown already in studies of teachers (one example here). Those who taught young kids in person were LESS likely to end up in the hospital than teachers who were online only (no physical interaction with kids).
Almost certainly, this is a byproduct of the highly efficient immune system in young children. These kids release chopped up bits of the c19 virus - almost a form of inoculation. These viral bits are sometimes big enough to cause disease (thus the higher infection rate among adults who are near them), but many are just big enough to activate adult immune systems (so these adults have created antibodies to several aspects of the virus before they get a dose that causes actual infection).
So hug your kids (or grandkids or nieces/nephews).
It is healthy for both of you.
(This is also a great example of why looking beyond simply the number of infections is critical for making good policy and sound decisions. Severity matters far more than infection rate.)