Thread by @themalariaarea

Our preprint is out!
We report the detailed clinical characteristics of 451 children & young people hospitalised with covid-19 in the United Kingdom from the ISARIC WHO CCP-UK study @CCPUKstudy

medrxiv.org/content/10.110…

Here are some of the key points we found:

1. Severe covid-19 was rare in children (17% (72/431) of admissions were to ICU / HDU) and death was extremely rare (0.7% (3/451) children and young people, all of whom had profound comorbidities)

2. Analysis of symptoms found a muco-enteric cluster which overlapped closely with the WHO criteria for Multisystem Inflammatory Syndrome in Children and Adolescents (MIS-C or PIMS-TS), suggesting that MIS-C may be the severe end of a spectrum of disease (orange cluster)

3. As a prospective study, we were able to follow the emergence of MIS-C in our cohort and found 36 children who met the WHO critiera for the syndrome

4. Although MIS-C / PIMS TS was first reported in early May, our cohort allowed us to see children meeting the MIS-C criteria as early as mid-March in the UK

5. Close examination of the children meeting the criteria for MIS-C found that they were signifcantly more likely to have a platelet count < 150 x10^9 than other children with SARS-CoV-2 (30% (10/33) vs 10% (24/232), p=0.004)

6. Those meeting MIS-C criteria were
older, (median age 10.8 years ([IQR 8.4-14.1] vs 2.0 [0.2-12.6]), p<0.001), more
likely to be of non-White ethnicity (70% (23/33) vs 43% (101/237), p=0.005) and 4x more likely to be admitted to ICU/HDU (61% (22/36) vs 15% (40/267, p<0.001)

7. Children with MIS-C were also more likely to present with headache (45% (13/29) vs 11% (19/171), p<0.001), myalgia (39% (11/28) vs 7% (12/170), p<0.001), sore throat (37% (10/27) vs (13% (24/183, p = 0.004) and fatigue (57% (17/30) vs 31% (60/192), p =0.012)

8. We hope our study might help inform future iterations of the WHO criteria and help paediatricians identify MIS-C more easily

Please do have a read! It's a paper rich in clinical data and we really hope it will be useful to clinicians with the potential to affect clinical practice and improve our understanding of paediatric COVID.

Thank you to all those who worked tirelessly over the past 2 months @TweedieChap @abdocherty79 @medcaremalawi @LanceTurtle @c_j_fairfield @ShamezLadhani @ewenharrison @c_j_fairfield @Tom_Drake1 @kennethbaillie @p_openshaw @OutbreakJake

ps - There has been a glitch uploading the supplementary information - We will get this sorted, watch this space!

Supplementary information is now up too for the full picture.

medrxiv.org/content/10.110…