Covid-19 Pandemic And Children: An Unprecedented Scenario

SARS-CoV-2 which is the causative agent for COVID-19 pandemic continues to manifest with severe acute respiratory syndrome among the adults, however, it offers a considerable signs of less severity and fatality in pediatric age group (0-18 years).

- Saif Hameed

The current scenario suggests that children may get infected but are less symptomatic with less mortality, concordant to earlier epidemic outbreaks of SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV, in 2002 and 2012, respectively. Although information of the adult patients with COVID-19 is in progress and published, in contrast, almost no comprehensive data or discussion about the COVID-19 in children is available. Therefore, the absence of paediatric patients with COVID-19 has perplexed clinicians, epidemiologists, and scientists.

Epidemiology of COVID-19 in Children: According to Chinese Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as of March 2020, only 2% cases of less than 19 years have been found affected by SARS-CoV-2 (Wu and McGoogan 2020). A study was conducted having 3 case series of SARS-CoV-2 infected children. The 1st series had 20 children from Zhejiang (until 31st Jan 2020), the 2nd series had 34 children from Shenzhen (19th Jan to 7th Feb 2020) and the 3rd series with nine infants from various provinces of China (Wang, et al. 2020; Chen, et al. 2020; Wei et al. 2020). Most of the clinical details were obtained from the 2nd series, like, no children had any underlying disease, respiratory symptoms were seen in 65% children, mild symptoms in 26% and 9% were found asymptomatic. The 1st case series was presented with mild to moderate fever, cough, rhinitis, diarrhea, headache and poor feeding, cyanosis, dyspnea in severe cases. The 3rd series presented with fever in four infants. Almost all the children with manifested symptoms recovered within couple of weeks. No death is reported in children infected with SARS-CoV-2 till date (Chen, et al. 2020).

Clinical presentation of COVID-19 in children