Clinical Characteristics of COVID-19 Infection in New-borns and Pediatrics: A Systematic Review

World Health Organization has declared COVID-19 a pandemic and a global health emergency.Thus, it is necessary to clearly characterize clinical manifestations and management of COVID-19 infection inchildren to provide accurate information for healthcare workers. Accordingly, the present study was designed toreview articles published on clinical manifestations and characteristics of children and infants with COVID-19.

In this systematic review, medical databases including Cochrane Library, Web of Science, Embase,Scopus, SID, Medline, WHO and LitCovid were searched using English and Persian keywords including COVID-19, Pediatrics, Newborn, Coronavirus 2019, 2019-nCoV, SARS-CoV-2. Finally, data of 14 related articles wereincluded in the study.

A total of 2228 children, newborns and infants were studied. Clinical manifesta-tion in children may be mild (72%), moderate (22%) or severe (6%), and the most common symptoms includedry cough (91%) and fever (96%). According to the included articles, two children had died, one of which was a14-year-old boy and his exposure history and underlying disease were unclear, and the other was a male new-born with gestational age of 35 weeks and 5 days, birth weight of 2200, Apgar score of 8, 8 (1 min and 5 min)and his first symptom was increased heart rate. No differences were found between male and female childrenregarding infection with COVID-19.

Most pediatrics were infected with COVID-19 due to familycluster or history of close contact. Infected children have relatively milder clinical symptoms compared to in-fected adults. We should pay special attention to early diagnosis and early treatment in children infected withCOVID-19.