PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Russell M Viner
AU  - Joseph Lloyd Ward
AU  - Lee D Hudson
AU  - Melissa Ashe
AU  - Sanjay Valabh Patel
AU  - Dougal Hargreaves
AU  - Elizabeth Whittaker
TI  - Systematic review of reviews of symptoms and signs of COVID-19 in children and adolescents
AID  - 10.1136/archdischild-2020-320972
DP  - 2021 Aug 01
TA  - Archives of Disease in Childhood
PG  - 802--807
VI  - 106
IP  - 8
4099  - http://adc.bmj.com/content/106/8/802.short
4100  - http://adc.bmj.com/content/106/8/802.full
SO  - Arch Dis Child2021 Aug 01; 106
AB  - Objective To undertake a systematic review of reviews of the prevalence of symptoms and signs of COVID-19 in those aged under 20 years.Design Narrative systematic review of reviews. PubMed, medRxiv, Europe PMC and COVID-19 Living Evidence Database were searched on 9 October 2020.Setting All settings, including hospitalised and community settings.Patients Children and young people (CYP) under age 20 years with laboratory-proven COVID-19.Study review, data extraction and quality Potentially eligible articles were reviewed on title and abstract by one reviewer. Quality was assessed using the modified AMSTARS criteria and data were extracted from included studies by two reviewers.Main outcome measures Prevalence of symptoms and signs of COVID-19.Results 1325 studies were identified and 18 reviews were included. Eight were high quality, 7 medium and 3 low quality. All reviews were dominated by studies of hospitalised children. The proportion of asymptomatic CYP ranged from 14.6% to 42%. Fever and cough were the the most common symptoms; proportions with fever ranged from 46% to 64.2% and with cough from 32% to 55.9%. All other symptoms or signs including rhinorrhoea, sore throat, headache, fatigue/myalgia and gastrointestinal symptoms including diarrhoea and vomiting were infrequent, occurring in less than 10%–20%.Conclusions Fever and cough are the most common symptoms in CYP with COVID-19, with other symptoms infrequent. Further research on symptoms in community samples are needed to inform pragmatic identification and testing programmes for CYP.No data are available. All data are from open-access published papers.