The U.S. Centers for Disease and Prevention Control (CDC) has found that the characteristic symptoms of COVID-19, such as fever, cough, and breathlessness, are less common in children than adults.
Lucy McNamara, Epidemiologist at CDC, and the CDC’s COVID-19 response team noted that 73 percent of American pediatric patients under 18 had at least one of the three characteristics coronavirus symptoms, compared with 93 percent of adults aged between 18 and 64.
The findings were based on a preliminary analysis of more than 149,000 confirmed cases as of April 2.
Nearly 58 percent of pediatric patients had a fever, which was the most common symptom of COVID-19, while 54 percent had a cough and 13 percent had shortness of breath.
In adults, cough (81 percent) was the most common symptom of COVID-19 than fever (71 percent) and shortness of breath (43 percent).
The CDC published the findings in the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR).
The authors wrote, “In both children and adults, headache and myalgia were more common than shortness of breath, as was sore throat in children.”
“These findings are largely consistent with a report on pediatric COVID-19 patients aged <16 years in China, which found that only 41.5% of pediatric patients had fever [and] 48.5% had cough,” they added.
However, there were a few limitations to the CDC analysis of pediatric patients, as the sample size was small. The data on COVID-19 symptoms was available for only 219 of 2,572 pediatric patients as of April 2.
The response team said, “The adult population included 10,944 individuals, who represented 9.6 percent of the 113,985 U.S. patients aged 18-65.”
“As the number of COVID-19 cases continues to increase in many parts of the United States, it will be important to adapt COVID-19 surveillance strategies to maintain collection of critical case information without overburdening jurisdiction health departments,” the team said.
Worldwide, the virus has affected more than 1,431,900 and killed over 82,000 people so far. In the United States, officials have so far reported 400,540 confirmed cases and 12,857 deaths.
