Evidence-Based Prediction of COVID-19 Severity in Hospitalized Children

OBJECTIVE: In this study, by using clinical and paraclinical characteristics, we have aimed to predict the severity of the disease in hospitalized COVID-19 children. METHOD: This cross-sectional study was conducted on medical records about epidemiologic data, underlying diseases, symptoms, and laboratory tests from March to October, 2020, on 238 hospitalized confirmed COVID-19 paediatric cases in several children's hospitals of Tehran, Ahwaz, Isfahan, and Bandar Abbas. RESULTS: From 238 patients, 140 (59%) were male and most of them were in the age group of 1 to 5 years (34.6%). Among all hospitalized patients, 38% had an underlying disease and in total, 5% of cases were expired. CONCLUSION: Determining patient severity is essential for appropriate clinical decision making; our results showed that in hospitalized pediatric patients, by using several variables such as SGOT, CRP, ALC, LDH, WBC, O(2)sat, and ferritin, we can use clinical and paraclinical characteristics for predicting the severity of COVID-19.