Pediatricians described the findings as reassuring, as children accounted for less than 1% of some cases of coronavirus in England, Wales and Scotland; and only 1% of those children died, the researchers report.
The researchers – from various UK institutions – analyzed data on 651 Covid-19 patients under the age of 19 who were admitted to 138 hospitals across England, Scotland and Wales between January and July. These young patients at the time accounted for 0.9% of all patients in those hospitals, the researchers found.
Overall, 18% of young patients needed critical care and “Black ethnicity was significantly associated with access to critical care,” the researchers found.
The most common symptoms that the young patients had were fever, cough, nausea or vomiting, and shortness of breath. The researchers found that 52 patients – as many as 11% – met the criteria for multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children, such as MIS-C, a troublesome complication of Covid-19 in which different body parts can be disrupted.
Children who may have had MIS-C were significantly older than those who were not and significantly more likely to have non-White ethnicity, the researchers found. Children with MIS-C were also five times more likely than others to have access to critical care.
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“However, on balance, it is an important study because it probably would have provided most children with a significant illness to the hospitals,” said Ramanan, who was not involved in the new study.
Dr. Liz Whittaker, an infectious disease leader at the Royal College of Pediatrics and Child Health in Britain, who was not involved in the study, called the findings “reassuring”.
It was unclear which patients were admitted directly to the hospital for coronavirus infection and who were admitted for other reasons, but happened to test positive for the virus. More research is also needed to determine whether similar findings occur among young patients in other parts of the world.
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