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Like all of you, I find the deluge of COVID-19 information difficult to keep up with. For that reason, I've scanned the recent pediatric literature and identified some interesting clinical reports that can inform practice and help answer patient questions.
What Have We Learned About COVID-19 in Kids?
A recent helpful and relatively brief review article summarizes what we have learned about this disease in children during the first wave of COVID-19. Here are some of the topics discussed:
Reasons why COVID-19 has a lesser effect on children than adults. Children may have other viruses in the respiratory tract that dampen the response to SARS-CoV-2, their immune system response may be different than the response of adults, and children may have had previous exposure to other coronaviruses — all of these might be factors.
Testing for COVID-19 in children. As with adults, the gold standard for diagnosis of acute infection is a reverse transcriptase polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) test, which is most accurate when performed on a nasopharyngeal sample. Viral replication likely stops 5-7 days after first symptoms, but children can remain RNA-positive for up to 2 weeks.
Clinical and radiologic features of COVID-19 in children.
