To the Editor, We found the article by Zhu et al interesting and informative. As there have been few reports in children, sharing their experience is quite useful for clinicians… Click to show full abstract
To the Editor, We found the article by Zhu et al interesting and informative. As there have been few reports in children, sharing their experience is quite useful for clinicians looking after children. Their report further confirms that most children with coronavirus diseaseā2019 have mild symptoms or no symptoms at all. There are a few observations we made from the article which we would like the authors to clarify. We are interested in knowing how many children in total were screened and the clinical features in those whose screening results were negative. In addition, we observed that one child needed oxygen and obviously had to be in hospital, we are curious as to why the remaining nine children were admitted as they seemed relatively well. Also, it would be good to know what informed the decision to treat the ones who were treated, how long they were treated for and if they experienced any side effects from the treatment. We noticed that some of the children had throat swabs while some had anal swabs, and are interested to know if there was any difference in yield from these two areas. It is also interesting to note that two of the children in this cohort had positive signs on chest computed tomography (CT) even without fever, cough, or shortness of breath and we are interested to know why they had CT scans in the absence of clinical signs. Furthermore, there were still five children on admission at the time of the report; we are interested to know the outcome of these children. While there are still so many aspects of this infection that are not fully understood, what is evident from this and other reports is that most children with this infection usually have mild symptoms or no symptoms at all and their outcomes are usually good. That is good to know but it also calls for caution as these infected but well children may be super spreaders of the virus.
               
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