Impact of COVID-19 pandemic on use of Pediatric Emergency Health Services in a Tertiary Care Pediatric Hospital in North India

  1. Ravitanaya Sodani
  2. Shalu Gupta
  3. Virendra Kumar

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Abstract

Objective

To compare Pediatric Emergency attendance pre-COVID 19 to that during COVID 19 pandemic and to study changes in patient profiles attending Pediatric Emergency Department during COVID 19 pandemic.

Methods

We conducted a retrospective cross-sectional observational study and collected data from Medical Record Section during the COVID-19 pandemic from January to June 2020 and compared it with data from 2019 in similar months. Data collected was analyzed to find out the impact of COVID – 19 on use of pediatric emergency health services with respect to patient attendance, age and clinical profile before and during COVID-19 in a tertiary care hospital in New Delhi.

Results

We observed a 43% decline in PED visits which increased to 75% during the period of lock-down (p value = 0.005). There was a significant decrease in children of age group 1-5 years attending PED. Mortality rate during lockdown had gone up by nearly 3times than the average monthly mortality.

Conclusions

While children might not have been directly affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, but the fear of COVID 19 and measures taken to control the pandemic has affected the health seeking behavior of patients to an extent that indirectly caused more damage than anticipated.

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    SciScore for 10.1101/2021.01.09.21249489: (What is this?)

    Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.

    Table 1: Rigor

    Institutional Review Board Statementnot detected.
    Randomizationnot detected.
    Blindingnot detected.
    Power Analysisnot detected.
    Sex as a biological variablenot detected.

    Table 2: Resources

    No key resources detected.

    Results from OddPub: We did not detect open data. We also did not detect open code. Researchers are encouraged to share open data when possible (see Nature blog).

    Results from LimitationRecognizer: An explicit section about the limitations of the techniques employed in this study was not found. We encourage authors to address study limitations.

    Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.

    Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.

    Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.

    Results from rtransparent:
    • Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
    • Thank you for including a funding statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
    • No protocol registration statement was detected.

    About SciScore

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  2. Version published to 10.1101/2021.01.09.21249489v1 on medRxiv