Coronavirus: 30 Hours Newborn becomes youngest person diagnosed with coronavirus

A Chinese newborn has been diagnosed with a new coronavirus 30 hours after birth, the youngest of cases recorded so far, state media said.

The baby was born on February 2 in Wuhan, the epicenter of the virus.
The infant’s mother tested positive before she gave birth. It is not clear how the disease is transmitted – in the womb or after birth.

Only a handful of children have come down with the virus, which has killed 565 people and infected 28 018.
All but one of the deaths was in China.

State-run media outlet Xinhua reported the news of the infection at the end of Wednesday.
He added that babies who weighed 3.25kg at birth (7lbs 2oz), is now in stable condition and under observation.

How can a baby has been infected?

Medical experts say it could be a case in which the infection is contracted in the womb.
“It reminds us to pay attention to mother-to-child transmission routes are possible into coronavirus,” the chief doctor of medicine department of Wuhan Children’s Hospital neonatal, Zeng Lingkong, told Reuters.

But it is also possible that babies born to infected after having close contact with the mother.
“It’s quite possible that the baby is lifted very conventionally – by inhaling droplets from the cough virus mother,” Stephen

Morse, an epidemiologist at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University, told Business Insider.

Is it common for children to get a virus?

Very few children have tested positive in the recent outbreak, which is consistent with other coronavirus outbreak in history including Sars and Mers.

A report by the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) said the average age of the patients for the current outbreak is between 49 and 56 years, adding that the case in children “has been rare”.

Similarly, during an outbreak of Mers in 2016, the World Journal of Clinical Pediatrics said the virus is rare in children, although it added that “the reason [this] low prevalence is unknown”.

A six-month-old baby in Singapore is known to have tested positive for the new coronavirus, as well as an eight-year-old from Wuhan who is currently in Australia.
The virus has spread overseas, with 25 countries a total of 191 confirmed cases, although there is so far only two deaths outside of mainland China.

The coronavirus that causes severe acute respiratory tract infections and symptoms usually begin with fever, followed by a dry cough. Most people who are infected tend to fully recover – as they would from the flu.