The study published by the medical journal JAMA Network indicates that more chest X-rays and treatment were needed when symptoms moved to the patients’ lower airways.
“To find that, on the contrary, omicron led to more intense illnesses in children affecting the lower respiratory level more, to find that it was more frequent in children and that it led to more consumption of services, such as X-rays, more use of corticosteroids, more rehydration by solute… I would say that it was a certain surprise”, said one of the authors of the study, doctor Simon Berthelot of the Laval University Faculty of Medicine a you CHU de Québec-Laval University Research Center.
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Dr. Berthelot and colleagues studied 1,440 patients under the age of 18 who had been admitted to one of 14 participating pediatric ERs between August 2020 and February 2022. The median patient age was two years.
About one in five patients required chest X-rays, compared to about one in ten patients in the alpha and delta variants. The percentages are similar with regard to the use of corticosteroids.
Nineteen percent of children infected with the omicron variant were readmitted to the emergency room, compared to 17% and 10% for those infected with alpha and delta. The percentage of cases requiring transfer to intensive care remained stable, regardless of the variant involved.
However, Dr Berthelot pointed out that more than eight out of ten patients in this study were not vaccinated, which could potentially explain the different response observed in children and adults.
“If we compare what happened to adults, where omicron turned out to be a milder disease than the original strain and the strains that followed (…), we may have a strain that explains the differences between the two populations,” said Dr. Berthelot.
This study highlights the need for epidemiological monitoring of children, added the researcher, “since they are not small adults”.
The study also demonstrates that the symptoms that characterize COVID-19 in children can be as different as they are in adults.
“The consequences of the disease are different for them, recalled Dr. Berthelot. This justifies not making undue inferences from the adult population to the pediatric population.