Preliminary epidemiological analysis on children and adolescents with novel coronavirus disease 2019 outside Hubei Province, China: an observational study utilizing crowdsourced data

Brandon Michael Henry; Maria Helena S Oliveira

The WHO Joint Mission reported that many pediatric cases were identified through contact tracing in households with infected adults and reported many pediatric patients had only mild symptoms. 11 A report by Chan et. al on COVID-19 clusters found in one household that 5 adults had symptomatic infections, while a child present in the residence tested positive for COVID-19 but was asymptomatic. 31 An infected family member was commonly reported in the present study, including a case of a physician transmitting the infection to his son. In another report, household exposure was reported found to be 70% in 10 pediatric COVID-19 patients. 16 Based on the obtained data, we suggest that in the presence of active community transmission in a region, children presenting with a fever of unknown cause or with a fever in the presence of common cold or pneumonia symptoms should be tested for COVID-19 and influenza A and B.