Children Produce Weaker

Coronavirus Antibodies, Study Finds

The research suggests that children clear the infection much faster than adults and may
help explain why many don’t become seriously ill.

By Apoorva Mandavilli

Nov. 5, 2020

Children infected with the coronavirus produce weaker antibodies and fewer types of them than
adults do, suggesting they clear their infection much faster, according to a new study published
Thursday.

Other studies have suggested that an overly strong immune response may be to blame in people
who get severely ill or die from Covid-19. A weaker immune response in children may
paradoxically indicate that they vanquish the virus before it has had a chance to wreak havoc in
the body, and may help explain why children are mostly spared severe symptoms of Covid, the
disease caused by the coronavirus. It may also show why they are less likely to spread the virus
to others.

“They may be infectious for a shorter time,” said Donna Farber, an immunologist at Columbia
University in New York who led the study reported in the journal Nature Immunology.

Having weaker and fewer antibodies does not mean that children would be more at risk of re-
infections, other experts said.

“You don’t really need a huge, overly robust immune response to maintain protections over
some period of time,” said Deepta Bhattacharya, an immunologist at the University of Arizona in
Tucson. “I don’t know that I would be especially worried that kids have a little bit lower
antibody response.”

The study looked at children’s antibody levels at a single point in time, and was too small to
provide insights into how the levels may vary with age. But it could pose questions for certain
antibody tests that may be missing children who have been infected.

Dr. Farber and her colleagues analyzed antibodies to the coronavirus in four groups of patients:
19 adult convalescent plasma donors who had recovered from Covid without being hospitalized;
13 adults hospitalized with acute respiratory distress syndrome resulting from severe Covid; 16
children hospitalized with multi-system inflammatory syndrome, the rare condition affecting
some infected children; and 31 infected children who did not have the syndrome. About half of
this last group of children had no symptoms at all.
Individuals in each group had antibodies, consistent with other studies showing that the vast
majority of people infected with the coronavirus mount a robust immune response.

“This further emphasizes that this viral infection in itself, and the immune response to this virus,
is not that different from what we would expect” from any virus, said Petter Brodin, an
immunologist at Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm.

But the range of antibodies differed between children and adults. The children made primarily
one type of antibody, called IgG, that recognizes the spike protein on the surface of the virus.
Adults, by contrast, made several types of antibodies to the spike and other viral proteins, and
these antibodies were more powerful at neutralizing the virus.

Children had “less of a protective response, but they also had less of a breadth of an antibody
response,” Dr. Farber said. “It’s because those kids are just not getting infected as severely.”

Neither group of children had antibodies to a viral protein called the nucleocapsid, or N, that is
entangled with the genetic material of the virus. Because this protein is found within the virus
and not on its surface, the immune system would only see it and make antibodies to it if the virus
were widely disseminated in the body, she said.

“You don’t really see any of that in the children, and that suggests that there’s really a reduced
infection course if these kids are getting infected,” she explained.

The finding could undermine the results from tests designed to pick up antibodies to the N
protein of the virus. Many antibody tests, including those made by Abbott and Roche and offered
by Quest Diagnostics and LabCorp, are specific to the N antibodies and so may miss children
who have successfully cleared the virus. “That’s absolutely an interesting implication of that
finding,” Dr. Brodin said.

Lower levels of virus in the body would also explain why children seem generally to transmit the
virus less efficiently than adults do.

But experts urged some caution in interpreting the results because they represent samples taken
from people at a single point in time.

Samples from the more severely affected children and adults were collected within 24 to 36
hours of being admitted or intubated for respiratory failure; those from children with mild or no
symptoms were banked after medical procedures.

The type of antibodies produced by the body varies over the time course of an infection. This
was a limitation of this study because the researchers may have been comparing people at
different points in their infection, Dr. Brodin said. “You risk comparing apples and oranges.”
Other experts cautioned that the study was too small to draw conclusions about how the immune
response may vary in children of different ages. The children in the study ranged in age from 3 to
18 years, with a median age of 11. But some studies have suggested that teenagers may be just as
much at risk from the coronavirus as adults.

“It’s very important to understand what happens in children,” to understand the nature of their
illness, but also how they contribute to spread of the virus in the community, said Dr. Maria L.
Gennaro, an immunologist at Rutgers University. But “to try and stratify by age, it’s a little bit of
a stretch in the analysis,” she said.

The researchers were also not able to explain why children have a more limited antibody
response.

Having fewer types of antibodies may seem like a bad thing, but “having a ton of antibody isn’t
necessarily a marker of a good thing,” said Dr. Bhattacharya. “It usually means that something
went wrong early in the response.”

At least one other study has suggested that children have a powerful inborn immune system,
intended to combat the many new pathogens they encounter, and that this first line of defense
may clear the infection early without needing to rely on later antibodies.

Another possibility is that the children have some protection — in the form of immune cells
called memory T cells — from previous encounters with common cold coronaviruses.

“Is it all innate? Or could there actually be some pre-existing memory?” Dr. Bhattacharya said.
“I think those are both possible.”

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Accessed from https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/05/health/covid-children-antibodies.html on

November 6, 2020

Critical Review

Discourse analysis itself is not only seen as the use of language in speech and writing but also as
a form of social practice. In this case, the discourse analysis becomes a tool that is capable of
interacting explicitly and implicitly with people's lives so that communication can be built in the
midst of society and also used as a movement to achieve certain goals.

Below is the review of the linguistic aspects of the paragraphs of the discourse in the form of
news (article) “Children Produce Weak er Coronavirus Antibodies, Study Finds”.
One of the most prominent lexical features of this article is the use of neutral reporting verbs. A
reporting verb is a verb used to signify that written text is being quoted or paraphrased
(NordquistThoughtco, n.d.).

Second, Kompas.com used causal sentences. It can be seen from the conjunctions used, such as
conjunctions maka (then) karena (because), oleh karena itu (therefore). These conjunctions have
the function to relate one paragraph as the causal of the movement of #2019GantiPresiden to
another paragraph as the effect of the movement itself.

Kompas.com also used direct quotations such as Hamdi mengatakan (Hamdi said), Hamdi setuju
(Hamdi agreed), lanjut dia (he continues). The quotations have a function to support the content
of the news, so the news that is presented becomes more factual and actual since it presents the
resource person who is competent in his field.