Children and young adults can experience post-acute or long-term symptoms of COVID-19 just like adults, according to a study recently published in PLOS Medicine. The CDC said people with long-term conditions of COVID can have a wide range of symptoms that can last more than four weeks or even months after infection. Sometimes the symptoms may even go away or come back. Some of the recurring symptoms may include fatigue or fever, respiratory or heart problems, neurological symptoms, and more. All people can develop these symptoms 90 days or more after their initial infection, however, children and young adults have fewer deaths or serious outcomes from COVID-19 infections than adults. Conducted by researchers from the Technical University of Dresden, Germany, they used data from almost half (46%) of the German population to determine that children and adults have the same relative risk of developing symptoms after COVID. The research was conducted because data on long-term COVID-19 are still limited, particularly for children and adolescents. The cohort study included 11,950 children and young adults and 145,184 adults who had previously been diagnosed with the virus. Data from German health insurance organizations were collected for patients between 1 January 2019 and 31 December 2020. The core population included all individuals insured for at least 1 day in 2020. The study was based on medical records of people with polymerase chain reaction (PCR)-confirmed COVID-19 infections throughout 2020. The authors compared the occurrence of predetermined diagnoses, entered in the medical record at least 3 months after infection, in patients with COVID-19 in a control group of more than 750,000 individuals matched for age, sex, and preexisting medical conditions, without PCR-confirmed COVID-19. Of the children and adolescents, 67% were under 12 years of age and adults were 18 years of age or older. Children and adolescents with COVID-19 were 30% more likely than the control group to have documented health problems 3 months or more after their infection with COVID-19 compared to Adults with COVID-19, by comparison, were 33% more likely than the control group to experience health problems over the same time period. Investigator-controlled population-based studies with extended follow-up are recommended, and further in-depth analyzes are needed to confirm the results among children and young adults.
