COVID-19 Trends for Children and Young Adults

David Voran, MD Informatics Director Community and Family Medicine Truman Medical Center – Lakewood, Kansas City

A Brief Review of: Leidman, et.al. COVID-19 Trends Among Persons Aged 0-24 – United States, March 1-December 12, 2020, MMWR Early Release/Vol.70 January 13, 2021. http://dx.doi.org/10.15585/mmwr.mm7003e1.

The CDC released a reassuring discussion of recent COVID-19 trends among pre-school and school age children indicating they are not a significant source of community spread. The data analysis from nearly 3 million case and laboratory data collected from March 1 to December 12, 2020 showed that school-aged patients mirrored the trends in adults and seniors across the nation. It is reasonable to assume an age group responsible for triggering outbreaks would show up as spikes in incidents that preceded the other age groups by a week or more. The current data shown in Figure 1 does not show any leading waves for any age group. The authors, with appropriate caveats, suggest this data supports early return to in-person schooling without exposing the rest of the population to additional risks or disease consistent with other findings.

Several thoughts came to mind upon reading this report. First was how quickly massive amounts of data were analyzed. Second, “Big Data”. The authors (and all of us) have access to tools that let us study the entire population instead of generalizing from small sample sizes. Third was how much this little virus has changed the world.

These authors are working with data less than a week old submitted electronically from over 44 states. Massive amounts of data now flow into data marts that many analytic tools at our fingertips such as R. Tableau, and even MS Excel can use to answer questions. All of this in periods that were difficult, if not impossible, a few years ago. We have witnessed how this virus has changed medicine, scientific datasharing, and human behavior.

I was curious whether our own data at Truman Medical Center, where we have performed over 100,000 COVID tests, would mirror the CDC data. Even though our pediatric numbers are very low, Figure 2 shows our data matched national data where spikes in COVID cases occurred simultaneously. Timing of the peaks matched the post Memorial Day, July 4th, and most recent surges.

This is all reassuring and we family physicians should use this to support in-person schooling for our young patients and vigorously support the use of proven mitigation steps in schools.

Figure 1. Weekly test volume and percentage of SARS-CoV-2-positive test results* among persons aged 0–24 years, by age group — United States, May 31–December 12, 2020†

Figure 2 found on page 7.