Children and COVID-19 Research Library

Following the SARS pandemic, jurisdictions around the world began developing ethical resource allocation frameworks for future pandemics—one such framework was developed by Thompson and colleagues. While this framework offers a solid backbone upon which decision-makers can rest assured that their work is driven by rigorous ethical processes and principles, it fails to take into account the nuanced experiences and interests of children and youth (i.e., young people) in a pandemic context. The current COVID-19 pandemic offers an opportunity to re-examine this framework from young people’s perspectives, informed by advances in childhood ethics and children’s rights. This paper revisits the Thompson et al. framework and propose adaptations to the ethical processes and values outlined therein. This work is informed by expertise in clinical ethics and literature related to impacts of COVID-19 and other pandemics on the health and well-being of children around the world, though with particular attention to Canada. During the processes of drafting this work, stakeholders were consulted—aligned with the approach used by Thompson and colleagues—to validate the interpretations provided. This study also proposes a new principle, namely practicability, to indicate the complex balance between what is possible and what is convenient that is required in ethically sound decisions in the context of services affecting young people. It outlines and discusses the strengths and limitations of our work and indicate next steps for scholars in the areas of childhood studies and child health.

COVID-19  was  a  new  SARS  variance  identified  in  2019  and  declared  the  cause  of  the  global  pandemic  in  March  2020. Nowadays, the case has experienced a fluctuating case phase, along with the mutation of the SARS Cov-19 variant that has not stopped yet. Confirmation cases and deaths occur in various ages, including in children. Although the data on COVID-19 case in children is low, efforts to prevent the transmission of Covid-19 in children is needed. This study aims to identify the effect of health education efforts to prevent Covid-19 transmission through 3M (wearing a mask, washing hands and physical distancing) habituation which was carried out using comic media with a cultural context. This  study  uses pre-experimental  research  with  one  group  pretest-posttest design.  The  study  was  conducted  to  see  the  effect  of providing  education  using  culture-based  comic  media  (independent  variable)  on  elementary  school  students'  attitudes  in  3M  practice (dependent variable). The population in this study were all students aged 10-12 years at MI Al-Kautsar Sorong, a total of 45 children. In this study, the sampling technique used is total sampling. The data were analysed with the Wilcoxon test.

The vaccine decision-making process of pregnant and lactating women is complex. Regarding COVID-19, pregnant women are at increased risk for severe disease and poor health outcomes. While pregnant and lactating women were excluded from COVID-19 vaccine trials, available evidence suggests that COVID-19 vaccines are safe and protective during pregnancy. This study used a socio-ecological approach to explore factors influencing the decision-making process for COVID-19 vaccines in pregnant and lactating women in Kenya, for the purpose of informing demand generation strategies.

SARS-CoV-2 infection in pregnancy is associated with a greater risk of maternal and newborn morbidity and maternal death. In Kenya, pregnant and lactating women (PLW) were ineligible to receive COVID-19 vaccines until August 2021. How shifts in policy influence vaccine behaviors, such as health worker recommendations and vaccine uptake, is not well documented. We conducted qualitative interviews with PLW, health workers, and policymakers in Kenya to understand how different stakeholders’ perceptions of national policy regarding COVID-19 vaccination in pregnancy shaped vaccine behaviors and decision-making. Policymakers and health workers described pervasive uncertainty and lack of communication about the national policy, cited vaccine safety as their primary concern for administering COVID-19 vaccines to PLW, and expressed that PLW were inadequately prioritized in the COVID-19 vaccine program.

The data on COVID-19 show an irrefutable and disturbing pattern: Black Americans are contracting and dying from COVID-19 at rates that far exceed other racial and ethnic groups. Due to historical and current iterations of racism, Black Americans have been forced into conditions that elevate their risk for COVID-19 and consequently place Black children at the epicenter of loss across multiple domains of life. The current paper highlights the impact of the pandemic on Black children at the individual, family, and school levels. Based on an understanding of the influence of structural racism on COVID-19 disparities, policy recommendations are provided that focus on equitable access to quality education, home ownership, and employment to fully address the needs of Black children and families during and after the pandemic. Research, practice, and policy recommendations are made to journal editors, funding agencies, grant review panels, and researchers regarding how research on COVID-19 should be framed to inform intervention efforts aimed at improving the situation of Black children and families.

To reach high vaccination rates against COVID-19, children and adolescents should be also vaccinated. To improve childhood vaccination rates and vaccination readiness, parents need to be addressed since they decide about the vaccination of their children. This study adapted the 7C of vaccination readiness scale to measure parents’ readiness to vaccinate their children and evaluated the scale in a long and a short version in two studies. The study was first evaluated with a sample of N = 244 parents from the German COVID-19 Snapshot Monitoring (COSMO) and validated with N = 464 parents from the Danish COSMO.

The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has brought racial and ethnic inequity into sharp focus, as Black, Asian, and Minority Ethnic people were reported to have greater clinical vulnerability. During the pandemic, priority was given to ongoing, reconfigured maternity and children’s healthcare. This study aimed to understand the intersection between race and ethnicity, and healthcare provision amongst maternity and children’s healthcare professionals, during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. Methods A qualitative study consisting of semi-structured interviews (N = 53) was undertaken with maternity (n = 29; August-November 2020) and children’s (n = 24; June-July 2021) healthcare professionals from an NHS Trust in ethnically-diverse South London, UK. Data pertinent to ethnicity and race were subject to Grounded Theory Analysis, whereby data was subjected to iterative coding and interpretive analysis. Using this methodology, data are compared between transcripts to generate lower and higher order codes, before super-categories are formed, which are finally worked into themes. The inter-relationship between these themes is interpreted as a final theory.

What are the clinical outcomes and associated factors among children and adolescents hospitalized with COVID-19 in sub-Saharan Africa?  In this cohort study of 469 children and adolescents hospitalized with COVID-19 in 6 sub-Saharan African countries, morbidity and mortality were substantially higher than reported among those in non-African settings and were independently associated with age younger than 1 year and select noncommunicable disease comorbidities.

The current work provides a multi-methods exploration of how within-person subtypes of self-oriented perfectionism (SOP) and socially prescribed perfectionism (SPP) were related to shifts in health-promoting behaviors among adolescents following the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Study One tested the 2 × 2 and tripartite models of perfectionism through a quantitative test of how such subtypes predicted changes in health behaviors pre-pandemic to intra-pandemic among 202 adolescents (M = 17.86, SD = 1.421). Results indicated that the combination of high SOP/high SPP was linked to the most maladaptive changes to health-promoting behaviors, supporting the tripartite model. Study Two aimed to contextualize these findings by analyzing semi-structured interviews with 31 adolescent self-identified perfectionists (M = 15.97, SD = 1.991) during the initial lockdown mandate.

The COVID-19 pandemic is having a major impact on the mental health of populations in the Americas. Studies show high rates of depression and anxiety, among other psychological symptoms, particularly among women, young people, those with pre-existing mental health conditions, health workers, and persons living in vulnerable conditions. Mental health systems and services have also been severely disrupted. A lack of financial and human resource investments in mental health services, limited implementation of the decentralized community-based care approach and policies to address the mental health gap prior to the pandemic, have all contributed to the current crisis. Countries must urgently strengthen their mental health responses to COVID-19 by taking actions to scale up mental health and psychosocial support services for all, reach marginalized and at-risk populations, and build back better mental health systems and services for the future.

Health disparities are defined as differences among specific populations in the ability to achieve full health potential (as measured by differences in incidence, prevalence, mortality, burden of disease, and other adverse health conditions). Among children, multiple factors contribute to these disparities, including economic stability, and access to health care. According to the Annie E. Casey Foundation, before the current pandemic, 12 million children in the United States were living in poverty in 2019, including one-third of African American and Native American children and 25% of Latinx children.8 During the same period, of the 4.4 million children without health insurance, 14% were Native American, 9% were of Hispanic descent, and 18% were immigrants. At present, owing to the impact of the pandemic on job security, more than 50% of African American, Latinx, and multiethnic adults are now without medical insurance, directly affecting the health security of their children.8 With the onset of the pandemic and the social and political upheaval felt by many disenfranchised communities, these well-documented disparities (and the importance of addressing them) have again been brought to the attention of the medical community. This overview will examine the effects of these health disparities in various populations of children in this country. We will first examine the historical context of health disparities, how they developed, and why they still exist. We will then examine how specifically the COVID-19 pandemic impacted these disparities among children and adolescents, both directly and indirectly. Finally, we hope to provide some recommendations to reduce these disparities.

The prevalence of mental health problems among children (ages 0–21) in the United States remains unacceptably high and, post-COVID-19, is expected to increase dramatically. Decades of psychological knowledge about effective treatments should inform the delivery of better services. Dissemination and implementation (D&I) science has been heralded as a solution to the persistent problem of poor quality services and has, to some extent, improved our understanding of the contexts of delivery systems that implement effective practices. However, there are few studies demonstrating clear, population-level impacts of psychological interventions on children. Momentum is growing among communities, cities, states, and some federal agencies to build “health in all policies” to address broad familial, social, and economic factors known to affect children’s healthy development and mental health.

Mathematical modeling studies have suggested that pre-emptive school closures alone have little overall impact on SARS-CoV-2 transmission, but reopening schools in the background of community contact reduction presents a unique scenario that has not been fully assessed. This study adapted a previously published model using contact information from Shanghai to model school reopening under various conditions. It investigated different strategies by combining the contact patterns observed between different age groups during both baseline and “lockdown” periods. It also tested the robustness of this strategy to the assumption of lower susceptibility to infection in children under age 15 years.