Clinical-epidemiological characterization of 77 children and adolescents infected with SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus

Introduction: Children are also vulnerable to Sars-CoV-2 infections, but their clinical manifestations are slight and the evolution in most of the cases is satisfactory. Objective: Characterize in a clinical-epidemiological way pediatric patients infected with the new SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus. Methods: Descriptive, cross-sectional and retrospective study in the first 77 patients under 18 years confirmed with COVID-19 and admitted in the pediatric service of "Dr. Luis Díaz Soto" Hospital, in the period from March 13th to June 30th, 2020. From the clinical records were taken data of variables like age and sex, comorbidities, source of infection and place of exposure, presence of symptoms and time of onset after the contact, and period in which started an improvement of the disease. Results: There was a discreet predominance of female sex (54.5 percent) and the adolescents (51.8 percent) being more vulnerable to the infection. Comorbidities were noticed in 23 cases (22.8 percent) and asthma was the most frequent (10-13 percent). It was specified the source of infection in 74 patients (96.1 percent) and 58 patients (75.3 percent) were asymptomatic during the diagnosis. The most frequent symptoms were: respiratory ones (cough: 7-36.8 percent; rhinorrhoea: 5-26.3 percent; and sneezing: 4-21,0 percent); followed by cephalalgia with 4 (21,0 percent); just 3 patients presented fever (15.8 percent) and other 3 presented anosmia-dysgeusia (15.8 percent).The evolution was favorable in 100.0 percent of the patients and most of them were asymptomatic at the seventh day. Conclusions: The infection by SARS-CoV-2 was present with significative distinction of sex, more commonly in adolescents with slight manifestations of the disease and satisfactory evolution. There were no deaths(AU)