Chinese infant becomes the youngest diagnosed with coronavirus

A 30-hour-old Chinese newborn has tested positive for the novel coronavirus and became the youngest patient to contract the illness.

It is the first suspected case of a mother-to-child transmission where the mother tested positive before giving birth at a local hospital in China's Wuhan, according to BBC.

The baby is weighed 3.25kg at birth and now reported in a stable condition and has been put under observation.

How the disease was transmitted:

Medical experts said it could be a case of mother-to-child transmission - where the infection was contracted in the womb.

"This reminds us to pay attention to mother-to-child being a possible route of coronavirus transmission," chief physician of Wuhan Children Hospital's neonatal medicine department, Zeng Lingkong told Reuters.

But it is also possible that the baby was infected after birth from having close contact with the mother.

"It's quite possible that the baby picked it up very conventionally — by inhaling virus droplets that came from the mother coughing," Stephen Morse, an epidemiologist at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University, told Business Insider.

Is it common for children to get the virus?

Very few children have tested positive in this recent outbreak, which is consistent with other coronavirus outbreaks in recent history including Sars and Mers.

A report by the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) said the median age of patients for the current outbreak is between 49 and 56 years, adding that cases in children "have been rare".

Similarly, during the Mers outbreak in 2016, the World Journal of Clinical Paediatrics said the virus was rare in children, though it added that the "reason for [this] low prevalence is not known".

A six-month-old baby in Singapore is known to have tested positive for the new coronavirus as well as an eight-year-old from Wuhan who is currently in Australia.