Common COVID-19 symptoms in children

Accordingly, the clinical symptoms of children with Covid-19 will be as belows:

- Incubation period is from 2-14 days, the average is 4 - 5 days.

- Onset: with one or more symptoms such as: fever, fatigue, headache, dry cough, sore throat, stuffy/runny nose, loss of taste/smell, vomiting and diarrhea, muscle pain. However the child usually have no symptoms.

+ Common clinical symptoms: fever 63%, cough 34%, nausea/vomiting 20%, diarrhea 20%, dyspnea 18%, nasopharyngeal symptoms 17%, hive 17%, fatigue 16%, abdominal pain 15%, Kawasaki-like symptoms 13%, no symptoms 13%, neurological symptoms 12%, conjunctival 11% and red throat 9%.

Illustration

+ Other less common symptoms: mucosal skin lesions (erythema of fingertips, skin rashes...); heart arrhythmia; ccute kidney injury – AKI; serositis (pleural effusion, peritoneal effusion, pericardial effusion); hepatomegaly, hepatitis; encephalopathy (convulsions, coma, or encephalitis).

- Progression: most children only have upper respiratory tract infection with low-grade fever, cough, sore throat, runny nose, fatigue; pneumonia and usually clears up on their own in about 1-2 weeks. About 2% of children have a severe course, usually on days 5-8 of illness. In which, some children (about 0.7%) need to be treated in the intensive care unit with serious complications such as: acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS), myocarditis, sepsis, shock infections, and multisystem inflammatory syndrome (MIS-C). Severe prognostic factors for children with obesity, growth retardation, cerebral palsy, chronic lung disease, immunodeficiency, diabetes, congenital heart disease... Mortality rate in children is very low (<0.1) %), most of them died from underlying diseases.

Recovery period: normally, if there are no serious complications from 7-10 days, the child will gradually get rid of clinical symptoms and recover from the disease.