1 / 10Children and adolescents are less vulnerable to the Covid-19 infection-causing coronavirus but more infectious than older individuals, new research conducted on more than 20,000 families from Wuhan by American and Chinese experts have found.2 / 10The findings of the large-scale retrospective study suggests prioritising the timely vaccination of “eligible children” and their caregivers to prevent the spread of secondary infections within households.3 / 10The level of Covid-19 infectivity in children should also be taken into account in context of reopening of schools, the researchers said.4 / 10The study has implications as countries begin mass vaccinations against the virus, which has infected more than 96 million and killed over 2 million people.5 / 10Published in The Lancet Infectious Disease journal this week, the study included the households of all lab-confirmed or clinically confirmed Covid-19 cases and lab-confirmed asymptomatic Sars-CoV-2 infections identified by the Wuhan Centre for Disease Control and Prevention between December 2, 2019, and April 18, 2020.6 / 10Wuhan was the first epicentre of Covid-19, accounting for 80% of cases in China during the first wave.7 / 10The aim of the research was to assess household transmissibility of Sars-CoV-2 and risk factors associated with infectivity and susceptibility to infection in Wuhan.8 / 10In all, the researchers covered 27,101 households with 29,578 cases and 57,581 contacts in Wuhan where the virus first emerged in late 2019.9 / 10“Within households, children and adolescents were less susceptible to Sars-CoV-2 infection but were more infectious than older individuals. Pre-symptomatic cases were more infectious and individuals with asymptomatic infection less infectious than symptomatic cases,” the researchers wrote.10 / 10“These findings have implications for devising interventions for blocking household transmission of Sars-CoV-2, such as timely vaccination of eligible children once resources become available,” they said.