3.1 Demographics and clinical characteristics
A total of 182 hospitalized pediatric COVID-19 patients with confirmed RT-PCR assays and available data were included in this study, and the demographics and clinical features are summarized in Table 1. The median age was 6 years old, ranging from 3 days to 15 years. About the half (48.4%) were preschool children, and the majority (83.5%) were 10 years and younger. There were more boys who got infected, with the male-female ratio of nearly 2:1. Most of the children were infected through family members, such as parents and/or grandparents. Forty-three children had the history of allergic diseases, including AR, asthma, AD, food allergy, drug allergy and urticaria. Other pre-existing diseases included repetitive or annual pneumonia, frequent colds, adenoid hypertrophy, tonsillitis, etc. (Table 2).
Although the common symptoms in pediatric COVID-19 patients were fever (43.4%) and dry cough (44.5%), almost one third (30.2%) of these children were asymptomatic. In addition, gastrointestinal symptoms accounted for a perceptible proportion (11.0%), such as diarrhea, abdominal discomfort and vomiting. The most (97.8%) of pediatric infections were not severe. Besides the essential supportive care, inhalation of interferon-α was the most common treatment. Systemic antiviral agents, such as ganciclovir and arbidol, were much less used. In 39 (21.4%) cases, antibiotics such as cephalosporins and azithromycin were employed . Few severe/critical patients received intravenous immunoglobulin (1.6%), systemic glucocorticoids (1.6%), and supplemental oxygen (2.7%). Three critically ill patients were also received mechanical ventilation. Other therapies included budesonide inhalation, montelukast and traditional Chinese medicine. All the hospitalized children with COVID-19 had recovered except one death. The median duration of hospitalization was 12 days, and that the time from first positive to first negative RT-PCR was 7 days (Table 1). Both the duration of hospitalization and the time of RT-PCR negative conversion were not significantly different between the different subgroups, such as allergic vs non-allergic patients, pneumonia vs no pneumonia, and younger vs older children (Figure 1).