, told The Telegraph the work shows 'SARS-CoV-2 continues to remain a very rare cause of death in children'. 'In general, the message is that healthy children don't really die of Covid,' he said. The researchers looked at all deaths of people under 20 years of age who died within 100 days of catching Covid. Half of the deaths occurred within a week of infection, and the majority within a month. Research used various national databases The research is the first of its kind to draw on various national databases and gathered huge amounts of information on each child who died of Covid in England during the pandemic. 'The strength that we have is that we have access to numerous databases at a national level and we also questioned the clinicians involved,' Prof Ladhani told The Telegraph. 'We talked to the GPs, we talked to the hospital doctors, we talked to the specialists looking after the children, we talked to the coroners, the histopathologists; whatever information we could gather to ascertain whether the cause of death was Covid or not. 'This was very resource intensive but because there were so few fatalities in children, we were able to collect all the information we needed for every child that died within 100 days of their positive test. Data show that the Covid){kind=link}
Data show that most of the 185 people under the age of 20 who died after being infected had serious underlying health conditions
Only 20 children and teenagers with no pre-existing health conditions died of Covid-19 in the first two years of the pandemic, analysis shows.
Data obtained by British health authorities found that between March 2020 and December 2021 there were 185 people under 20 who died within 100 days of catching Covid.
A detailed review found more than half were not due to Covid, with the coronavirus the underlying cause of death in 81 of the cases.
Of these deaths, 61 were children with serious underlying health conditions, such as severe neurodisability and immunocompromising conditions.