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).