Association of contact to small children with mild course of COVID-19

It is known that severe COVID-19 cases in small children are rare. If a childhood-related infection would be protective against severe course of COVID-19, it would be expected that adults with intensive and regular contact to small children also may have a mild course of COVID-19 more frequently. To test this hypothesis, a survey among 4,010 recovered COVID-19 patients was conducted in Germany. 1,186 complete answers were collected. 6.9% of these patients reported frequent and regular job-related contact to children below 10 years of age and 23.2% had own small children, which is higher than expected. In the relatively small subgroup with intensive care treatment (n=19), patients without contact to small children were overrepresented. These findings are not well explained by age, gender or BMI distribution of those patients and should be validated in other settings. ### Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest. ### Clinical Trial This is not a clinical trial. It is a biomedical study, which was approved by the responsible ethics committee (Institutional Review Board) at the University Hospital Muenster, Germany. Approval number of the local ethic committee: AZ 2020-220-f-S ### Funding Statement no third party funding ### Author Declarations I confirm all relevant ethical guidelines have been followed, and any necessary IRB and/or ethics committee approvals have been obtained. Yes The details of the IRB/oversight body that provided approval or exemption for the research described are given below: Local ethic committee approval: AZ 2020-220-f-S at the University Hospital of Muenster, Germany All necessary patient/participant consent has been obtained and the appropriate institutional forms have been archived. Yes I understand that all clinical trials and any other prospective interventional studies must be registered with an ICMJE-approved registry, such as ClinicalTrials.gov. I confirm that any such study reported in the manuscript has been registered and the trial registration ID is provided (note: if posting a prospective study registered retrospectively, please provide a statement in the trial ID field explaining why the study was not registered in advance). Yes I have followed all appropriate research reporting guidelines and uploaded the relevant EQUATOR Network research reporting checklist(s) and other pertinent material as supplementary files, if applicable. Yes Due to data protection regulations, individual patient data cannot be published for this study.