Efficacy and Safety of Antibiotic Agents in Children with COVID-19: A Rapid Review

Jianjian Wang; Yuyi Tang; Yanfang Ma; Qi Zhou; Weiguo Li; Muna Baskota; Yinmei Yang; Xingmei Wang; Qingyuan Li; Xufei Luo; Toshio Fukuoka; Hyeong Sik Ahn; Myeong Soo Lee; Zhengxiu Luo; Enmei Liu; Yaolong Chen

Two reviewers (Jianjian Wang and Yuyi Tang) assessed the quality of evidence independently by using the Grading of Recommendations Assessment, Development and Evaluation (GRADE) approach. In the GRADE approach, direct evidence from RCTs begins at high quality, and evidence from observational studies at low level. The quality can be downgraded for five reasons (study limitations, consistency of effect, imprecision, indirectness, and publication bias) and upgraded for three reasons (large magnitude of effect, dose-response relation, and plausible confounders or biases) (26) (27) (28) (29) (30) (31) . In order to reflect the extent of our confidence that the estimates of the effect are correct, the quality of evidence will be graded as high, moderate, low, or very low. We produced a "Summary of Findings" table, which presented the overall quality of a body of evidence for each outcome, by using the GRADEpro software (32, 33) . We did not assess the quality of evidence of the case series and case reports on the use of antibiotics and bacterial coinfections in patients with COVID-19.