Researchers have found that children show some of the most common symptoms of coronavirus. The symptoms include fatigue, fever, and headache, with only a few developing a loss of taste and smell, and cough, as per The Guardian ’s report.

The team who developed the COVID-19 symptom study app mentioned that their new data showed that coronavirus acts differently in children.Tim Spector, of King’s College London, who led the Covid app study, said to The Guardian : “We need to start telling people what are the key symptoms at different ages, rather than this blanket obsession with fever, cough, and lack of smell.”

The team collated the data gathered from 198 COVID-19 positive children out of almost 16,000 tested. The children were likely tested after their parents tested positive for the virus. Researchers noted that these children demonstrated a different set of symptoms of the virus and one-third of children were asymptomatic.

About 55 per cent of children had fatigue, while 54 per cent had a headache and almost half had a fever. Sore throats were present in around 38 per cent of the children with symptoms, while almost 35 per cent skipped meals, 15 per cent had an unusual skin rash and 13 per cent had diarrhoea.

However, in adults, the team found that the most common symptoms were fatigue, headache, a persistent cough, sore throat, and loss of smell. “If you followed the government’s advice, you’d be missing half of the (symptomatic) infections,” Spector added. “What we want to do here is not push (children) to have tests, but just keep them away from school (if they show symptoms),” he noted.

According to another analysis published in EClinicalMedicine, a journal of The Lancet , Covid-19 can damage children’s hearts to an extent that it may lead to Multisystem Inflammatory Syndrome in children (MIS-C).

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