Covid-19 epidemiology in pediatric patients from Ecuador

Abstract

COVID-19 is an infectious disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus that was first identified in December 2019 in the city of Wuhan, Hubei province in the People's Republic of China, the virus is transmitted from one person to another in the respiratory secretions that are dispersed when the infected person coughs, speaks or sneezes. With 10.93 deaths per million people from coronavirus as of April 6, 2020, Ecuador has one of the highest mortality rates from COVID-19 in Latin America, with only 7.46 Polymerase Chain Reaction tests. (RT-PCR) per 10,000 people. Pediatric cases were rare in the first days of the COVID-19 outbreak, but with the appearance of family aggregation, they began to appear, registering the first cases on March 27th. The pediatric group is always susceptible to upper respiratory tract infections because their immune system is developing. This report describes the epidemiological situation of pediatric patients in Ecuador, where it was shown that adolescents aged 15 to 18 years were more susceptible to contracting COVID-19 and the group with the highest mortality was from 0 to 9 years old, it was also shown that of the total diagnostic tests performed, 63.6% were RT-PCR tests and 36.3% were rapid tests.