This analysis of 2.6 million healthcare records by Oxford University researchers shows that there are higher proportions of ethnic minority children in England testing positive for COVID-19 than white children, with Asian children more likely to be admitted to hospital with the illness.
The research team from the Universities of Oxford, Leicester, Nottingham, Cambridge and Southampton analysed a nationally-representative sample of 2,576,353 electronic healthcare records in children to understand whether the established link between ethnicity and COVID-19 in adults was similar in children.
Overall, 410,726 (15.9% of the total cohort) children in the analysis were tested for SARS-CoV-2, with 26,322 (6.4% of children tested) receiving a positive test and 343 (0.01% of the total cohort) admitted to hospital. The study found that COVID-19 testing in children varied across race and ethnicities - 17.1% of white children in the study were tested for SARS-CoV-2 compared with 13.6% of Asian children, 12.9% of children from mixed/other ethnicities, and 8.3% of Black children.
Compared with white children, the odds of a positive test were higher in children from Asian (1.8 times more likely), Black (1.12 times more likely) and mixed/other ethnicity (1.14 times more likely) backgrounds.
Asian children were 1.62 times more likely to be admitted to hospital with confirmed COVID-19 compared with white children, while Black, mixed race and children from other ethnicities were more likely to remain in hospital for 36 hours or longer compared with white children. There was one death in the study cohort.