Covid 19 coronavirus: The symptoms to look out for in children

Scientists say diarrhoea, vomiting and stomach pains should be included on the list of official symptoms of Covid-19 in children.

The symptoms have been found to be fairly common among adults, writes the Daily Mail.

But UK health officials say the symptoms are "too vague" and that if everyone with a stomach ache thought they had Covid-19, the health system would be overcrowded.

Scientists in Northern Ireland report that the signs are so strongly linked to the virus in children that they should be included as official symptoms.

But coughing, one of the most common symptoms in adults, wasn't a reliable indicator that a child had Covid-19, they said.

Dr Tom Waterfield told the BBC that it was "worth considering" adding diarrhoea and vomiting to the list of known symptoms.

Waterfield and his colleagues studied 992 children with an average age of 10, 68 of whom had Covid-19.

Including gastrointestinal symptoms would have significantly increased the number of children who could be diagnosed.

One of the most important decisions to make when defining an official symptom is how many of the people with that symptom will have the disease, and how many will have something else.

Only 34 of the kids in the study who had coronavirus were symptomatic.

By looking at children with the official symptoms: fever, coughs and changes in smell or taste - scientists correctly diagnosed 76 per cent of children with coronavirus.

But when they included children with stomach issues, this rose to 97 per cent - 33 of the 34.

Because so many children don't have symptoms, and many of those don't have common ones, experts say most of them won't ever be diagnosed.

Waterfield and his colleagues wrote: "This study demonstrates that approximately half of children are asymptomatic when infected with SARS-CoV-2 and that current UK testing strategies will fail to diagnose the majority of paediatric infections."

Fever was the most common sign, while stomach and gut symptoms were reported in 13 of the children.

Meanwhile, only six lost their sense of smell or taste. Britain's health service has come under fire for having too narrow a definition of the virus.

The American Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) lists 11 symptoms, and someone who has any of those can get a test.

But the official policy in the UK is that only those with one of the three main symptoms should get tested.