Коронавирусная инфекция COVID-19 у детей в Российской Федерации

Abstract

Humanity has recently encountered an infection caused by a new strain of human coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2). This infection is characterized by a variety of clinical symptoms with lesions not only to the respiratory tract, but also to other organs, lack of causal therapy, and high mortality rate. Wide spread of COVID-19 contributes to the development of this disease in children. Objective. To identify clinical and epidemiological characteristics of new coronavirus infection in children in the Russian Federation (RF). Materials and methods. We performed a retrospective analysis of all confirmed COVID-19 cases among children in the RF between January and June 2020. Information on patients (age, gender, place of residence, reason and date of examination, and clinical form of the disease) was taken from the database containing reports of the Federal Service for Surveillance on Consumer Rights Protection and Human Wellbeing according to from No. 970 ‘Information on cases of infectious diseases in people with suspected coronavirus infection’ for January–June 2020. The results were processed by generally accepted statistical methods with the calculation of the Fisher s-criterion. Differences were considered significant at p <0.05. Results. A total of 47,712 cases of COVID-19 were registered in children during the first 6 months of 2020 in the Russian Federation, which accounted for 8.4% of all COVID-19 cases. Children of all ages are affected with boys having the disease slightly more often than girls (52.2% vs. 47.8%, p > 0.05). The majority of hospitalized children were younger than 3 years of age. The proportion of pneumonia among children treated in inpatient departments was 4.4% and two-thirds of them were older than 3 years (p < 0.001). Upper respiratory tract infections were diagnosed in 83% of children. Almost one-fifth of children (18.2%) had hyperthermia at the disease onset, although high-grade fever (>39°С) was detected only in 2.6% of children. Half of the patients (50.8%) had cough. Only one in four children developed rhinitis/rhinopharyngitis. Symptoms that are pathognomonic for COVID-19, such as loss of smell (anosmia) and taste (ageusia), were registered in 17% of cases only. Conclusion. Children with new coronavirus infection usually have mild disease. Key words: children, coronavirus, COVID-19