The team found that more than 60 per cent of Covid-19 positive children required hospital treatment, and that eight per cent needed intensive care. Of the 582 children studied, just four died. On the other hand, more than 90 children, or 16 per cent, showed no symptoms at all.

Marc Tebruegge, from University College London’s Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health, says that while the results shouldn’t be extrapolated for the general population, they were nevertheless reassuring.

“The case fatality cohort was very low and it is likely to be substantially lower still, given many children with mild disease would not have been brought to medical attention and therefore not included in this study,” he says.

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“Overall, the vast majority of children and young people experience only mild disease,” adds Tebruegge, lead author of the study published in The Lancet Child & Adolescent Health journal.

“Nevertheless, a notable number of children do develop severe disease and require intensive care support, and this should be accounted for when planning and prioritising health care resources as the pandemic progresses.”

The most common symptom among children in the study was fever (65 per cent), followed by upper respiratory tract infection (54 per cent), while 25 per cent had pneumonia. Age is known to be a key risk factor for Covid-19 patients, and children have been far less severely affected than adults since the pandemic’s outset.

But the study found a small number of children infected with additional respiratory viruses at the same time as Covid-19, and these were more than three times likely to require intensive care than those with Covid-19 alone.

“This could have important implications for the upcoming winter season, when cold and flu infections will be more common,” says paper author Begona Santiago-Garcia, from Spain’s University Hospital Gregorio.