Fig. 2: SARS-CoV-2 infections in children are more often asymptomatic than in adults, although dysgeusia is a good indicator of SARS-CoV-2 infection in both adults and children.

Box and whisker plots showing that there is no difference in antibody response between asymptomatic and symptomatic SARS-CoV-2 infections in adults (a in blue, p = 0.684, n = 414) or children (b in orange, p = 0.712, n = 181), as assessed by MULTICOV-AB. The receptor binding domain (RBD) is shown as an example, all other SARS-CoV-2 antigens are shown in Fig. S7. Boxes represent the median, 25th and 75th percentiles, while whiskers show the largest and smallest non-outlier values. Outliers were identified using upper/lower quartile ±1.5 times IQR. Statistical significance was calculated using Mann–Whitney-U (two-sided). ns indicates a non-significant p value >0.05. The four symptoms reported in this study were then examined for their frequency within the study population (c), with all symptoms more commonly reported in seropositive adults (in blue) than seropositive children (in orange). Each symptom was then examined for its predictive ability to indicate SARS-CoV-2 infection (d), with dysgeusia a strong predictor in both adults (dark blue, 84.2%) and children (dark orange, 87·5%). All other symptoms were poor predictors in children (fever 59.5%, cough 37.4%, diarrhea 54.6%) compared to adults (fever 85.8%, cough 75.0%, diarrhea 80.7%). Only samples from T1 were analyzed for this figure (n = 717 adults, 548 children). “+” indicates presence of the symptom “−“ indicates absence of the symptom. MFI Median Fluorescence Intensity.