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Across geographies, genders, and occupations, the new coronavirus is an indiscriminate infector. COVID-19 appears to plague people ubiquitously—including children who, despite hopeful early reports, do not seem more immune to the virus. The latest figures from China, where the outbreak began last year, suggest that those under the age of 18 may contract the pathogen at comparable rates to adults.

But a mysterious semblance of mercy remains: After being infected, kids seem less likely to fall seriously ill, with more than 90 percent of pediatric cases presenting as moderate, mild, or without symptoms entirely. This youthful resilience has been seen in infectious diseases before, such as chickenpox.

At this point, individuals with notable symptoms make up the bulk of those getting screened for SARS-CoV-2, the virus behind the pandemic. Many people with mild or no symptoms have likely gone undetected, and as global testing efforts rev up, the reported rates of severe disease in children could still change.

On March 24, Los Angeles County public health officials reported the death of a teenager, believed to be the first coronavirus-related death of a United States minor. Still, early testing results tell us that it’s “very likely that kids are affected less,” says Eric Rubin, an infectious disease researcher and physician at Harvard’s School of Public Health and editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine.

A pattern similar to this emerged during outbreaks of SARS and MERS: Those two severe respiratory diseases, also caused by coronaviruses, seemed to largely spare kids. Scientists and clinicians still have much to learn about the new virus and the immune system’s defenses against it—but untangling why SARS-CoV-2 is less severe in children could help experts suss out new ways to combat the spread of the disease.

“The way to beat this virus is to really understand the biology, and how we respond to the virus,” says Gary Wing Kin Wong, a pediatric pulmonologist at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and an author of a recent study about the prevalence of COVID-19 in children. “Then, we can tackle it at all levels.”