Children also contract coronavirus infection, contradictory to the popular assumptions, though they show only mild symptoms of the disease and the government is trying to ensure that they do not become part of the chain of infection, NITI Aayog Member-Health, Dr VK Paul said today. The second wave of Covid-19 has seen a rise in the number of children getting infected, which has alerted the country's health experts to empahsise on ways to tackle the infection in children who have existing comorbidities.

"The matter of children is more important...They do get Covid. But the symptoms are minimal. They are largely asymptomatic," Dr Paul told reporters.

"However, the task is to make sure that they do not become part of the chain through which the disease spreads among people," he said, it added.

In India around 26 per cent of the population is under the age of 14 and nearly 7 per cent are below the age of five.

The National Commission for Protection of Child Rights has also written to the Union Health Ministry and Indian Council of Medical Research alerting them that the third wave may target the children as warned by health experts.

Dr Paul also said that the rural areas have been affected more by in the second wave than the urban areas but he assured that the situation was stabilising.

"The pandemic is stabilising in a major part of the country. The positivity rate is going down and the number of active cases is going down," the NITI Aayog member said, repeating the message he gave out a week before. (SAM)