It's breaking
news that many Kids are admitted for COVID-19 in US.
A new study found health
care providers may be overcounting the number of kids hospitalized for
COVID-19, overestimating the small impact the disease has on children.
Researchers at the Stanford
University School of Medicine analyzed COVID-19 data from Lucile Packard
Children’s Hospital Stanford from May 10, 2020, to Feb. 10.
During the nine-month
period, 117 patients under the age of 18 either tested positive for SARS-CoV-2
at the hospital or were hospitalized for multisystem inflammatory syndrome in
children, or MIS-C.
Out of the 117 children,
nearly 40% of COVID-19 cases were asymptomatic, according to the study
published Wednesday in the peer-reviewed journal Hospital Pediatrics.
About 45% of those
hospital admissions were categorized as unlikely to be caused by the virus.
“It’s in keeping with
what other studies have shown, which is that children in general are relatively
mildly affected by the infection,” said Dr. Asim Ahmed, a pediatric infectious
disease specialist unaffiliated with the study and senior medical director at
Karius, an infectious disease diagnostic company.
Dr. Alan Schroeder, study co-author and clinical
professor of pediatric critical care and pediatric hospital medicine at
Stanford, said it’s important to distinguish between children who test positive
but are asymptomatic and those who are hospitalized for COVID-19 to understand
how the disease truly affects the pediatric population.
“Our goal is to make sure we have accurate data on how sick
children are getting,” he said.
“If we rely on hospitals’ positive SARS-CoV-2
test results, we are inflating by about twofold the actual risk of
hospitalization from the disease in kids.”