COVID-19 Higher risk of serious illness for children than other viruses: Study

A new Canadian-led study based on a previous study investigating how the SARS-CoV-2 virus affects children, found a small number of children seeking emergency care and diagnosed with COVID-19 infection. Experience serious consequences. ..

Published in Peer-reviewed JAMA network opens on TuesdayOf the 3,221 adolescents enrolled in a study tested positive for the SARS-CoV-2 virus in the emergency department, 3.3% showed serious results within 14 days and 22.8% were hospitalized. I found. A total of 10,382 participants were enrolled in the study.

“Importantly … Children with COVID with enough illness to be hospitalized are ill enough to be hospitalized for other similar types of illnesses such as influenza, bronchiolitis, respiratory syncytitis, etc. Children are more likely to be ill than children in the world “(RSV), co-author Dr. Stephen Friedman, a professor of pediatrics and emergency medicine at Cumming School of Calgary University, told CTV News.ca in a telephone interview.

According to Friedman, the findings enrolling participants under the age of 18 between March 2020 and June 2021 are based on pre-delta and pre-Omicron cases and reflect the current situation. Should not be considered as a thing.

Friedman emphasized that the study only reflected people seeking emergency care at one of the 41 sites in the study, not the percentage of the general community. “They aim to provide an estimate of this risk in ED-screened pediatric populations,” the paper said. The study did not include, for example, children who were positive but did not test. Enrollment included patients from Argentina, Australia, Canada, Costa Rica, Italy, New Zealand, Paraguay, Singapore, Spain, and the United States.

The results also suggested that older children in the study were at higher risk of serious outcomes, and younger children, especially very young children, were at lower risk. Children with underlying serious comorbidity were also at increased risk.

Severe outcomes are major patients with complications including heart attack or heart failure, stroke, septic shock, encephalitis, respiratory failure, and death, or major such as chest drainage and extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO). Intervention was defined in the study as the case.

“Also, the duration of the illness when they were in care is serious in the window, which is a child who was already symptomatic for 4-7 days, at higher risk than the other durations we saw. It turned out to be related to the results, shorter or longer, “Friedman said.

Researchers have also found that geography also influences results. In Canada, for example, it was far less likely to have more serious consequences than the US reference group.This may be partly due to the fact that there were wider and more accessible tests in Canada compared to the United States.

“We had a broader foundation of some sort, but in some other countries, especially in the early United States, testing was more restricted,” Friedman explained.

There are other retrospective studies suggesting similar findings through database methodologies. What makes this particular study unique is that 41 emergency department patients in 10 countries were positively enrolled in the cohort study and were database-independent. This allowed researchers to collect more patient-level details and enrolled before notable results were documented.

“The point of our study is that this actually happens and the actual risk of hospitalized children is significant, which is confirmed by Public Health Agency data,” Freeman said. Stated and serious consequences.

“The bottom line is that it’s not a trivial illness because some children are hospitalized.”