INTRODUCTION
The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is a new emerging infectious
disease reported in December 2019 to the World Health Organization (WHO)
by the Chinese health authorities as a new outbreak of pneumonia-like
cases in Wuhan, China [1,2]. The etiologic agent is the severe acute
respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). COVID-19 has turned
into a pandemic, up until June 19, 2020, there were 8.24 million
confirmed cases and 445,535 deaths worldwide [4].
Pediatric patients represent approximately 2.4% of the overall
confirmed cases [5]. Illness severity spectrum in children is
classified as asymptomatic, mild, moderate, severe and critical disease
[6], in contrast, adult clinical classification does not include
moderate disease [7,8]. Nevertheless, illness severity among
children is thought to be mainly a mild disease [7,9], various
studies have reported severe and critical cases as well as fatal
outcomes [10-12] whereas an important proportion of children cases
are asymptomatic [13].
The spectrum of disease in pediatric patients has a very heterogeneous
behavior unlike adults, mostly of patients develop asymptomatic and mild
disease, where fever, cough and gastrointestinal symptoms predominate,
but can also develop severe disease, requiring hospitalization and even
mechanical ventilation, less frequently compared to adults
(<7%), recently Multi-systemic Inflammatory Syndrome related
to SARS-CoV-2 infection has been described how a severe disease in
children. [7, 14, 15]
COVID-19 has a different behavior between age groups regarding
epidemiological and clinical characteristics, therefore this study aims
to provide a qualitative and quantitative analysis to summarize the
evidence available in the literature, about epidemiology, illness
severity and clinical features among children.