Pediatrician, watch out for corona-phobia

The current outbreak of COVID-19 raging globally is taking a heavy toll on the adult population, with a rapidly growing number of newly infected and critically ill patients. However, to date, mortality rate among children is low as they mostly suffer from a mild disease. Yet, other more routinely encountered childhood diseases do not stand still and continue to be the main share of pediatricians’ everyday challenges. Here we describe a case series of routinely seen pediatric diseases with delayed diagnosis due to different aspects of what we call “Corona-phobia”. These cases were easily collected within a 1-week period which implies that this is a more widespread phenomenon. In conclusion, this raises the possibility that measures taken to mitigate this pandemic may be more damaging to children overall than the virus itself. We believe that pediatricians as well as policy makers should take this important aspect into consideration.