Are Children Most of the Submerged Part of SARS-CoV-2 Iceberg?

Frontiers in Pediatrics

article

Stefano Passanisi¹  Giuseppina Salzano¹  Giovanni Battista Pajno¹ 

[1] Department of Human Pathology in Adult and Developmental Age Gaetano Barresi, University of Messina

关键词: children;    coronavirus;    COVID-19;    Italy;    outbreak;    pandemic;    transmission;   

DOI  :  10.3389/fped.2020.00213

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: Frontiers

【 摘 要 】

Since the end of 2019, a novel coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) caused by a novel coronavirus, severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) has been developing in Wuhan, Hubei Province, China (1). In very few months it has spread all over the world and the World Health Organization on March 11, 2020 declared COVID-19 a pandemic. Italy is currently one of the most affected countries in Europe. At the time of this publication, 120,290 cases of SARS-CoV-2 infection have been detected. Median age of infected patients is 62 years. Interestingly, only 1.5% of patients diagnosed with SARS-CoV-2 are aged 0–18 years. Thus far, among the 14,381 subjects who died with SARS-CoV-2 in Italy, there was only one child (2). These data are in concordance with those reported from other European countries and a recent review of 72,314 COVID-19 patients by the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention that revealed that there were <1% of pediatric cases. Furthermore, among children younger than 10 years of age no deaths were reported (3). Even during the outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV) and middle-east respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV) the rate of infected children was quite low (5–7% and 2–3%, respectively) (4, 5).

【 授权许可】

CC BY