The Physical & Mental Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Children

Social Isolation

The quarantine period forced children into isolation with their families. Children without siblings had little or no in-person socialization with other kids their age for many months. For children during the development phase, this lack of socialization could be harmful to their long-term social abilities.

A failure to properly socialize with peers during developmental age can manifest itself later on as a wide range of personality disorders, mood disorders, erratic behaviors, and potential cognitive abnormalities.

Social Isolation → More Antisocial Behavior

Record high technology usage for younger demographics than ever before reported to be using screens at high rates. Highest number ever of TV, console, mobile device sales with primary consumer reported to be in the 8-12 demographic. 

● Average daily screen time estimates for ages 8-12 approximated around 6-8 hours/day during peak quarantine (March-July)
● Record high pursuit of individual activities such as chess, gardening, or other solo pursuits that cannot translate to social activity post-pandemic

Delta Variant: Prevalence, Vaccinations

The delta variant is now the dominant strain of COVID-19 in the US. How can we prevent future new variant delta spread?

The current measures include:

● Get vaccines to your children, adolescents and adults as soon as available

● Washing your hand frequently

● Maintain social distance at least 6 ft. apart

● Wear masks in crowded area

The following are the effects of quarantine on our teenagers and adults, the physical and mental impact in summary are:

● Chronic headaches, generalized myalgia and multiple somatic complains without objective findings

● Anxiety, loneliness, and depression

● Spending time on social media, tv, and watching videos

● Overall teens were resilient, yet worried, isolated yet connected to family, well rested yet concerned

Physical Isolation

● Quarantine took a toll on children's bodies as well. A lack of social activity oftentimes corresponded to a lack of athletic activity

● Participation in team sports, which are the most common type of sport for younger children, was completely halted during the quarantine

● Individual exercise such as biking, running, or swimming is uncommon among young children. Many kids went without exercise at all

● Exercise is important to childhood development

Physical Isolation → Worse COVID Outcomes

● Children with underlying conditions like diabetes, undernutrition, high blood
pressure, etc have worse COVID outcomes. A lack of exercise can exacerbate COVID complications in already compromised children. Exercise is closely correlated with better health outcomes for all. Physical isolation prevents children from exposure to microbes and other organic material that helps build immune tolerance. The emergence of delta D virus, a variant of COVID-19 SARS.

Delta Variant is a Concern for Children

● Due to the fact that most of children all around the United States and world wide are still not vaccinated properly there are likely chances of their getting infected with the Delta variant virus and develop complications due to lungs involvement. D virus is airborne and enters the body through airway passage. The variant itself causes mild symptom however spreads very fast by droplets caused by sneezing, close contact with other kids and causing severe lungs involvement.

Moving Forward

● Improve vaccination rates among children

● Continue monitoring psychological outcomes for children who lost social
development time during quarantine

● Improve remote socialization and learning infrastructure for children so that
when this happens again, we are prepared

● Hope for the best

Covid-19 vaccines for children and teens: what we do know and what we do not know

Vaccines have been the vital to slow the spread of viruses in all individual and preventing the serious illnesses related to COVID. Most of the COVID-19 and its variants infections are mild however only in a few cases they have developed serious inflammatory condition myocarditis and pericarditis. There are now 3 FDA approved vaccines available for children 12 years and older, for adolescents and adults and the new guidelines from CDC and American Academy of pediatrics strongly suggest vaccinating our children.

1.  The Pfizer/BioTech vaccines given in 2 doses 3 weeks apart
2.  The Moderna and Johnson & Johnson vaccines 

The COVID-SARS and Delta variants

All viruses including COVID-19 and Sars-COV-2 evolve over time. when a virus replicates or makes copies of itself it sometime changes its structure the so called “ mutation’ and is called as variant of the original virus. The COVID vaccines provide some protection against the new variants since these vaccines elicit a broad immune response involving antibodies formation in body. The WHO in collaboration with the CDC and scientists are working hard to stop the spread of these deadly delta variants.

Role of vaccines producing immunity in body

The vaccine researches done so far concludes that children's are getting same dose of vaccine as adult. Researchers will need to evaluate the impact of these vaccines on protecting children from infection with COVID variants. However biologically there seems no reason to expect differences in vaccine coverage of variants in adults/children. Vaccinating children will be critical to achieving a population -wide level of immunity-herd immunity-sufficient to slow the emergence of dangerous variants and bring an end to the pandemic.

Bibliography

Araújo, L. A. D., Veloso, C. F., Souza, M. D. C., Azevedo, J. M. C. D., & Tarro, G. (2020). The potential impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on child growth and development: a systematic review. Jornal de Pediatria. Published. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jped.2020.08.008 COVID-19 in 7780 pediatric patients: A systematic review. (2020, July 1). ScienceDirect.
https://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S2589537020301772

Singh, S., Roy, D., Sinha, K., Parveen, S., Sharma, G., & Joshi, G. (2020). Impact of COVID-19 and lockdown on mental health of children and adolescents: A narrative review with recommendations. Psychiatry Research, 293, 113429. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.psychres.2020.113429

Zimmermann, P., & Curtis, N. (2020). Coronavirus Infections in Children Including COVID-19. Pediatric Infectious Disease Journal, 39(5), 355–368. https://doi.org/10.1097/inf.0000000000002660