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From a recent news story:
[T]here has not been a single [documented] case of a child under 10 transmitting COVID-19, even through contact tracing carried out by the World Health Organisation (WHO).
Let's hope this doesn't just reflect a gap in the evidence!
UPDATE: See the first comment below, the news account, above, is not quite accurate.
That Sky News assessment was just a tiny bit too optimistic (sorry to say).
FullFact has this on 19 May: https://fullfact.org/health/covid-19-in-children/, including this paragraph:
"Other contact tracing studies found that children were very rarely the first person to develop Covid-19 symptoms within a household (known as the index case). However, these studies also suggest that it is at least possible for children to transmit the virus: a review found three instances where a child under 10 was the index case within a household."
So kids don't seem to catch or transmit it nearly as much as adults, but we do have a few cases where a child seems to have passed it on in their household.
It seems like there's several things I'd want to know. First, how large is each of these studies? How many households did they attempt to contact trace? Second, how many of these households were they able to trace to an index case of each age range? Third, how many of these households were they unable to identify the index case for? Fourth, how many households in each category contain children under 10, and more generally, people of any given age range? Fifth, how many households contain a person of any given age range who is the only case within the household?
Without all of this information, it's a bit hard to tell whether the lack of household transfer from young children is just because young children rarely go anywhere alone other than school, and most jurisdictions have closed schools.
The Sky News story is indeed a bit too optimistic. The meta study referred to, which is not linked in the article but can be found at the address here (https://dontforgetthebubbles.com/the-missing-link-children-and-transmission-of-sars-cov-2/) is more nuanced. It concludes as follows:
/quote/
-Children appear significantly less likely to acquire COVID-19 than adults when exposed
-There is reasonable evidence that there are significantly fewer children infected in the community than adults
-Children are rarely the index case in a household cluster in the literature to date
-It is not clear how likely an infected child is to pass on the infection compared to an infected adult, but there is no evidence that they are any more infectious
The most parsimonious explanation for all the above seems to be that children are less susceptible to becoming infected, therefore fewer of them have become infected, there are subsequently fewer infected individuals in the community, and children have therefore infrequently brought the infection into their homes.
/endquote/
Personally I was delighted to send my younger daughter back to school this week (albeit on very different basis to normal, and my elder daughter is still not allowed to go to school. She is 8.) and think that primary schools at least should reopen where I am (I'm in London), as they have in some other countries. But it is clearly not conclusively established that there would be no risk in this.
This hasn't been updated recently, but at the time I took it as fairly strong evidence that transmission from kids was quite rare: https://explaincovid.org/post/kids-and-covid-19/iNR6ns6TY6OqDPfWrcqg
Also, here is a fixed version of Ben's link, which covers similar ground: https://fullfact.org/health/covid-19-in-children/
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