OBJECTIVES: In the UK, healthy children and pregnant women are no longer offered COVID-19 vaccination. This study assessed the outcomes of children and women-of-childbearing-age admitted to a large London hospital with SARS-CoV-2. METHODS: Electronic records of children and women-of-childbearing-age with a positive SARS-CoV-2 PCR (January 2023-September 2024) were reviewed. Hospital Episode Statistics (HES) database disease-coding accuracy was evaluated. RESULTS: Over 20 months, 334/4764 (7.0%) SARS-CoV-2 tests in children were positive; 150/334 (44.9%) were hospitalised (representing 0.81% of 18,412 childhood admissions); of these, 121 were non-incidental infections (0.66% of childhood admissions), including 26/121 (21.4%) with severe COVID-19 (0.14% of childhood admissions). COVID-19 was the sole diagnosis in 68 healthy children (55 infants, 13 older children), including five with severe COVID-19. In non-pregnant women, 295/7,181 (4.1%) tests were positive, 95 (95/295, 32.2%) were hospitalised; 12 (12.6%) were non-incidental, including two at-risk women with severe COVID-19. In pregnant women, 46/124 (37.1%) tests were positive (representing 0.82% of 5,630 pregnancies); nine (9/46, 19.6%) were hospitalised (0.15% of pregnancies), including four with non-incidental COVID-19, (0.07% of pregnancies), and none had severe COVID-19. Comparison with HES found 19/29 (65.5%) of incidental infections in children and 37/88 (42.0%) in women were coded as primary COVID-19 hospitalisations, while 15/150 (10.0%) of admissions in children and 36/104 (34.6%) of admissions in women had no associated ICD-10 code. CONCLUSIONS: Rates of severe COVID-19 were low. National databases for SARS-CoV-2 surveillance need to capture disease activity more accurately.
Lewis et al. (Thu,) studied this question.
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