Children’s younger nose cells may be better at fighting off SARS-CoV-2

Is this maybe an explanation why younger people had little to fear from SARS-CoV-2/Covid-19?

"Children’s younger nose cells may be better at fighting off SARS-CoV-2, a new study in Nature Microbiology suggests; researchers analyzing nose lining cells from healthy people from different age groups—under-12s, 30-50 year olds, and over 70s—found that aging adult nose cells contained 100X more virus in the first few days after an infection."

From the abstract:

"Children infected with SARS-CoV-2 rarely progress to respiratory failure. However, the risk of mortality in infected people over 85 years of age remains high. Here we investigate differences in the cellular landscape and function of paediatric (<12 years), adult (30–50 years) and older adult (>70 years) ex vivo cultured nasal epithelial cells in response to infection with SARS-CoV-2. We show that cell tropism of SARS-CoV-2, and expression of ACE2 and TMPRSS2 in nasal epithelial cell subtypes, differ between age groups. While ciliated cells are viral replication centres across all age groups, a distinct goblet inflammatory subtype emerges in infected paediatric cultures and shows high expression of interferon-stimulated genes and incomplete viral replication. In contrast, older adult cultures infected with SARS-CoV-2 show a proportional increase in basaloid-like cells, which facilitate viral spread and are associated with altered epithelial repair pathways. We confirm age-specific induction of these cell types by integrating data from in vivo COVID-19 studies and validate that our in vitro model recapitulates early epithelial responses to SARS-CoV-2 infection."

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Age-specific nasal epithelial responses to SARS-CoV-2 infection (open access)

Fig. 1: Characterization of SARS-CoV-2-infected NEC cultures from different age groups.