Children stay in the hospital for an average of three days with covid-19. Adults remain hospitalized for more than twice as long.
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While the median length of stay of children admitted to hospital with covid-19 is three days, the median for the total population is eight days, more than twice as much. In addition, children make up only 1.6 percent of the total number of hospitalized patients, while they represent 3 percent of the confirmed cases.
This is evident from a new report by Sciensano into the characteristics of infections with covid-19 in children in Belgium.
The health institute brought together lab data, school data and information from hospital admissions to gain a better insight into the impact of the new coronavirus on children. The period studied ran from March 15 to June 28. A positive covid-19 test was then reported in a total of 1,511 children.
This means that the number of confirmed cases in children is low. Children are tested less often, but even if they were tested in the period studied, the result was less often positive than in adults (1.8 percent compared to 6.3).
The number of confirmed cases in children accounted for 3 percent of the total number of infections. Children accounted for 1.6 percent of the number of hospital admissions. More than 80 percent of those hospital admissions were without serious complications. ‘The length of stay of children in hospital was therefore usually short (median of 3 days) and was significantly lower than that for all patients in the hospital surveillance (median of 8 days),’ the report reads.
It is striking that children younger than 3 months represented a large proportion of the hospitalizations among children. “This is presumably explained by the fact that fever is an alarm signal in these young children that quickly leads to a diagnostic test, and the fact that a positive test is more of a concern in this age group,” it read.
Of the Belgian hospitalized children, 3 percent ended up in intensive care, while a large European study spoke about 8 percent. Here too Sciensano sees a possibly logical explanation, because unlike the Belgian study, the European study mainly took into account the input of specialized pediatric hospitals, ‘as a result of which the hospital population described in that study was possibly more seriously ill’.
Schools
Regarding the number of covid-19 cases in schools, Sciensano is aware of 378 infections (270 in students and 108 in staff). A ‘limited number’ of secondary cases were reported: 11 staff and 36 students were suspected to be infected after contact at school. Of course, distance learning was the rule during the period studied, especially in secondary education.
In the report Sciensano writes that there is still debate about the extent to which children contribute to the spread of the virus. Foreign studies show that children rarely bring the disease into their household and do not often transmit the virus at school, but on the other hand, there is a large outbreak in a high school in Israel with 153 infected students and 25 infected teachers. German lab results of 3,712 covid-19 patients, on the other hand, show that the viral load in young children does not differ from that in adults.
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