Children and COVID-19 Research Library

The aim of this study was to estimate the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the circulation of non-SARS-CoV-2 respiratory viruses and clinical characteristics of COVID-19 in hospitalized children. 226 and 864 children admitted to Children's City Clinical Hospital with acute respiratory infection in September-November of 2018 and 2020 in Moscow were tested for respiratory viruses using multiplex PCR and Mycoplasma pneumoniae/Chlamydia pneumoniae using ELISA.

The paper presents results from a fieldwork study with Russian Roma children. Two groups of children, 6–8 years and 8–10 years old, were involved in the study. Before the pandemic crisis began in Russia, a large number of Roma children were kept home by the parents. The study was conducted in a Roma settlement of a small town not so far from Moscow, and the author was living with the Roma family for a week. Using an ethnographic approach, he observed the communication between children and adults, children and siblings, children and neighbours. The ROMLAT test was used to measure the knowledge of Roma children regarding different grammatical categories from their mother tongue. The Roma oral tradition served among the community as a factor stimulating the language development of the children and maintaining their Romani.

Today the COVID-19 pandemic consequences for the preschool education system is one of the most popular research topics, as the lockdown led to serious disruptions to the usual way of family life that is a key condition for the normal development of a child. In Russia, a typical reaction of the authorities to the pandemic was the massive closure of childcare enterprises, that gave many families an additional burden in the form of the task of mastering the preschool education program. In this situation, digital technologies are of particular importance for the successful organization of preschool education in the family and the preservation of an emotionally positive tone in the family, according to the authors of this paper, the educational potential of which depends on how much the preschool child and his family are involved in them. Based on the results of the study, the authors conclude that digital literacy of family members is one of the conditions for a positive experience of the COVID-19 lockdown for families with preschool children.