Home quarantine compliance is low in children with fever during COVID-19 epidemic

BACKGROUND: The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak began in China at the end of 2019. The disease is highly infectious. In order to prevent and control the epidemic situation, the state has issued a series of measures to guide the prevention and control of the epidemic. At the same time, it also introduced the measure of home isolation for children with fever. However, due to the nature of children, the implementation of the home isolation turned out to be quite difficult, and questions regarding the home isolation were brought out by parents when seeing doctors. For this reason, we decided to conduct this study. AIM: To study factors that influence home quarantine compliance in children with fever during the COVID-19 epidemic. METHODS: A total of 495 paediatric patients with respiratory tract infection and fever were selected from the general fever clinic at Xiamen Children’s Hospital from February 6-27, 2020. On day 8 after the hospital visit, follow-up was conducted by telephone to evaluate the compliance of home quarantine. RESULTS: Among the ten quarantine measures, the proportion of families adhering to keeping 1.5 m distance, proper hand hygiene, wearing masks at home, and proper cough etiquette was very low (< 30% for each measure). Our analysis showed that compliance was related to gender and age of children, gender and age of primary caregiver, number of children in the family, and intensity of information on quarantine measures. We observed that compliance increased with the age of children. Compared with children whose caregivers were young adults, children with elderly caregivers were 2.461 times more likely to show poor compliance. Furthermore, children who received intensive information on quarantine measures had significantly better compliance. CONCLUSION: Compliance of children with fever to quarantine measures at home is low during the COVID-19 epidemic. Strengthening education on the quarantine measures is critical to improve compliance, in particular in young children with elderly caregivers.