COVID-19 trends and severity among symptomatic children aged 0-17 years in ten EU countries, 3 August 2020 – 3 October 2021
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Abstract
To guide evidence-based prevention of COVID-19 in children, we estimated risks of severe outcomes in 820,404 symptomatic paediatric cases reported by 10 EU Member States between August 2020 and October 2021. Case and hospitalisation rates rose as overall transmission increased but severe outcomes were rare: 9,611 (1.2%) were hospitalised, 640 (0.08%) required intensive care and 84 (0.01%) died. Despite increased individual risk (aOR; 95% CI for hospitalisation: 7.3; 3.3 - 16.2, ICU: 8.7; 6.2 - 12.3) in cases with comorbidities such as cancer, diabetes, cardiac or lung disease, most (83.7%) hospitalised children had no reported comorbidity.
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SciScore for 10.1101/2021.11.25.21266875: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
Ethics not detected. Sex as a biological variable not detected. Randomization not detected. Blinding not detected. Power Analysis not 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: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:There are important limitations to this study. The analysis is based on surveillance data reported to TESSy. Data on vaccination status of the children in this study was not available, however vaccination rates in children were very low generally and …
SciScore for 10.1101/2021.11.25.21266875: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
Ethics not detected. Sex as a biological variable not detected. Randomization not detected. Blinding not detected. Power Analysis not 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: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:There are important limitations to this study. The analysis is based on surveillance data reported to TESSy. Data on vaccination status of the children in this study was not available, however vaccination rates in children were very low generally and vaccines only approved for use in children 12-17 years at the time of the study. As children are less likely to be symptomatic for COVID-19 than adults [11,12], reporting of cases may be biased towards those with severe disease, and although cases with hospitalisation date prior to date of onset were considered not hospitalised for this analysis, some remaining reported paediatric hospitalisations may have been for reasons other than COVID-19. While this could over-estimate the crude risk of hospitalisation, we are aware that hospitalisations are under-reported to TESSy by at least three of the countries in our study, which would have the opposite effect, and our results are comparable to those reported among symptomatic cases in a recent review [10]. Reporting of comorbidities was less likely among cases with severe outcomes, making our effect estimates conservative for cases with a comorbidity. Low numbers of children with severe outcomes diminish the analytical power of the study, particularly for less common outcomes. This, together with incomplete reporting of comorbidities, prevented a detailed risk factor analysis.
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.
Results from scite Reference Check: We found no unreliable references.
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