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School's back in fits and starts, live, remote, and hybrid. But now on top of COVID, kids will go back to having all of the other things kids have: colds, flu, rashes, asthma flares. How should our approach change during a pandemic?
Medscape spoke with Katie K. Lockwood, MD, a primary care pediatrician at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) Primary Care and host of Primary Care Perspectives: Podcast for Pediatricians, about her approach.
A recent study reported on the clinical presentation of children with SARS-CoV-2. In this admittedly small sample of 192 kids, only about half of those with acute SARS-CoV-2 infection had fever. Most other symptoms, if present at all, were nonspecific. So my question is, can these kids be distinguished from those with a garden-variety upper respiratory illness (URI) or flu? How do you think these ill children should be evaluated?
I think you're hitting on one of the biggest issues heading into the fall. Many of the symptoms of COVID-19 overlap with those of other common respiratory infections. However, the loss of taste and smell, although it's not always there, is fairly unique to COVID, so that can help distinguish when it is present.
