Division of Hospital Medicine, Monroe Carell Jr. Children's Hospital at Vanderbilt and Department of Pediatrics, Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, Nashville, Tennessee.
Children's Hospital Association, Lenexa, Kansas.
J Hosp Med. 2021 May;16(5):294-297. doi: 10.12788/jhm.3608.
The impact of COVID-19 public health interventions on pediatric illnesses nationwide is unknown. We performed a multicenter, cross-sectional study of encounters at 44 children's hospitals in the United States to assess changes in healthcare utilization during the pandemic. The COVID-19 pandemic was associated with substantial reductions in encounters for respiratory diseases; these large reductions were consistent across illness subgroups. Although encounters for nonrespiratory diseases decreased as well, reductions were more modest and varied by age. Encounters for respiratory diseases among adolescents declined to a lesser degree and returned to previous levels faster compared with those of younger children. Further study is needed to determine the contributions of decreased illness and changes in care-seeking behavior to this observed reduction.
COVID-19 公共卫生干预措施对全国儿科疾病的影响尚不清楚。我们在美国 44 家儿童医院进行了一项多中心、横断面研究,以评估大流行期间医疗保健利用的变化。COVID-19 大流行与呼吸道疾病就诊次数的大幅减少有关;这些大量减少在疾病亚组中是一致的。虽然非呼吸道疾病的就诊次数也有所减少,但减少幅度较小且因年龄而异。与年龄较小的儿童相比,青少年的呼吸道疾病就诊次数下降幅度较小,且恢复到以前水平的速度更快。需要进一步研究以确定疾病减少和寻求护理行为变化对这种观察到的减少的贡献。