Lung disease experts at Vanderbilt University Medical Center and their colleagues have determined a key factor as to why COVID-19 appears to infect and sicken adults and older people preferentially while seeming to spare younger children.
The researchers discovered that children have lower levels of an enzyme the virus needs to invade airway epithelial cells in the lung. Their preliminary findings, has been posted online by the preprint server bioRxiv, suggest that blocking this enzyme potentially could prevent COVID-19 infection in older people.