Children and COVID-19 Research Library

Strict lockdown measures were introduced in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, which caused mass disruption to adolescent swimmers’ daily routines. To measure how lockdown impacted nutritional practices in this cohort, three-day photograph food diaries were analysed at three time points: before (January), during (April), and after (September) the first UK lockdown. Thirteen swimmers (aged 15 ± 1 years) from a high-performance swimming club submitted satisfactory food diaries at all time points.

Chrono-nutrition is an emerging field of research that includes three aspects of time: (1) regularity, (2) frequency, and (3) clock time. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the implemented lockdown, daily routines were disrupted, which presented a unique opportunity to investigate chrono-nutrition, in particular in adolescents. A nested case-control study was conducted and information on chrono-nutrition was collected via an anonymous online questionnaire including 99 participants aged 13 to 20 years (N = 43 before the COVID-19 pandemic and N = 56 during the COVID-19 pandemic).

Jordan is a small, highly resource-constrained country situated in the heart of the Middle East. Long a haven for refugees fleeing regional conflict, over one-third of Jordan’s 10 million residents are not Jordanian. Jordan is home to approximately 1.5 million Syrians, half of whom are registered as refugees with UNHCR. Jordan is also hosting 2.5 million registered Palestine refugees. In Jordan, GAGE has collected mixed-methods baseline data (between mid-2018 and early 2019) with approximately 4,000 Syrian, Palestinian, Jordanian and Dom adolescents living in host communities, formal refugee camps and informal tented settlements; fielded three rounds of covid-19 phone surveys; and is running ongoing participatory research groups with older married girls, out-of-school boys and adolescent girls and boys with disabilities (15–19 years). GAGE is also evaluating a variety of UNICEF Jordan’s programming. This brief highlights headline emerging findings and provides links to fuller publications.

Since 2019, Lebanon’s economy has been caught in an accelerating downward spiral, which the World Bank predicts will rank in the top three most severe global economic crises in the last 150 years. Food prices have now climbed more than 500%, over half of the country is living below the poverty line and the electrical grid is on the verge of collapse as fuel has become unavailable. For the 1.5 million Syrian refugees and nearly 200,000 Palestinian refugees living in Lebanon, the situation is even more dire. In Lebanon, GAGE is running participatory research groups with 83 vulnerable Syrian, Palestinian and Lebanese adolescents. These young people are between the ages of 15 and 19 and live in host communities, formal refugee camps served by UNRWA (Palestinians), and informal tented settlements  (Syrians). The participatory research groups were established in 2019 and meet every four to six weeks  to discuss themes related to GAGE’s conceptual framework. This brief highlights headline emerging findings and provides links to fuller publications.

From August 2017, the largest wave of Rohingya refugees crossed the Myanmar border into Bangladesh, fleeing crimes that the UN Special Rapporteur has claimed ‘bear the hallmarks of genocide’. Over 880,000 displaced Rohingya now live in 32 makeshift and 2 registered refugee camps in Cox’s Bazar district, one of Bangladesh’s poorest regions, where 1.36 million people – comprising both refugees and host community residents – remain in need of humanitarian assistance. This brief draws on mixed-methods data collected both before and after the onset of the covid-19 pandemic. Drawing on quantitative and qualitative data from younger (aged 10–14) and older (aged 15–19) cohorts at baseline, our research captures the voices of Rohingya and Bangladeshi adolescents and their views on everyday life, including the structural and socio-cultural constraints they face and whether they are being left behind.

This study aimed to analyze the dietary patterns of adolescent students during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown. To achieve the research´s aim 127 adolescent students, 60 men (18.88±4.18 years) and 67 women (17.61±7.43 years) completed an online questionnaire that analyzed variables regarding their nutritional profile. Adolescent students presented a dietary pattern during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown characterized by different associations of food consumption, On one hand, the consumption of healthier foods such as meat, fish, vegetables, legumes, rice, or pasta, and on the other hand non-healthier foods as food, alcohol, or pastries.

To  suppress  the  COVID-19  transmissions,  almost  all  activities  related  to  physical  and  social activities between individuals are restricted. Activity restrictions such as lockdowns or physical-social distancing can trigger an elevation in stress. This study aimed to determine the correlation between stress levels and food habits among adolescents in Indonesia. This cross-sectional study was conducted through an online questionnaire involving 5924 adolescents in all regions in Indonesia using the snowball sampling technique.

The first case of the COVID-19 pandemic in Maharashtra was confirmed on 9 March 2020. Since then, the state remained a prominent hotspot. Urban metropolitan regions of Mumbai, Pune, Thane and urban cities like Nagpur and Nasik have reported maximum number of cases in the state.  The COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent lockdown greatly disrupted lives, specifically for the urban poor. It, therefore, became very clear early in the lockdown that large-scale interventions would be required to address the COVID-19-induced challenges. To support the Government in its endeavour to save lives and reduce the impact of the pandemic, UNICEF Maharashtra, along with its strong network of development partners and corporate donors, formulated and coordinated several eff orts across cities of the state to facilitate targeted actions to redress the impact of COVID-19 at the community level. This report is an attempt to present an overview of the work jointly done by the State Government, UNICEF and development partners to mitigate the impact of COVID-19, particularly for the cities of Maharashtra.

The COVID-19 pandemic has been associated with weight gain among adults,1 but little is known about the weight of US children and adolescents. To evaluate pandemic-related changes in weight in school-aged youths, this study compared the body mass index (BMI; calculated as weight in kilograms divided by height in meters squared) of youths aged 5 to 17 years during the pandemic in 2020 with BMI in the same period before the pandemic in 2019.

Food preferences are among the strongest predictors of the food choices of adolescents. These are associated with appetitive traits (food approach and avoidance) to some extent. However, no research has been conducted so far analyzing the association between food preferences and appetitive traits of adolescents. The aim of this study was to evaluate the associations between food preferences and appetitive traits in adolescents (aged 15–20 years) within the Polish Adolescents’ COVID-19 Experience (PLACE-19) Study population. The PLACE-19 Study was carried out in a population-based sample of 2448 secondary school students sampled across the country (random quota sampling).

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused huge changes in people’s lifestyle, health, and social relationships. This situation has had an impact on children and adolescents, affecting their health, intellectual, physical, and emotional development. The survey aimed to compare eating behaviors, level of physical activity (PA), hours of sleep, and screen time among Polish children and adolescents aged 6–15 years before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. We obtained self-reported data from 1016 participants at two measurement points before and during the COVID-19 lockdown in Poland to examine the influence of the lockdown and the distance learning on PA, dietary habits, sleep, and media usage of children and adolescents aged 6–15 years.

Since the first identified case on 2 March 2020 until 13 July 2021, more than 1,200 people have lost their lives, meaning that too many boys and girls suffered the tragic and permanent loss of a grandparent, parent, caregiver or loved one. More than 46,860 persons tested positive, implying that and even greater number of loved ones might have fallen ill, making it hard for them to care for family, keep plans or sustain employment. Meanwhile, almost every household in Senegal was affected by restrictions designed to contain the first wave. While the strict measures were largely successful in limiting the spread of the virus, they also affected key sectors of the economy, disrupted supply chains and markets, and affected both the demand for, and availability of, social services. Essentially, COVID-19 impacted almost every aspect of life, particularly in the first quarter of 2020, which we now recognize as the first “leg” in a multi-year, planet-wide marathon to outpace the pandemic. With the closure of schools and disruption of many basic services, child protection mechanisms also lapsed, triggering a crisis for children with considerable socio-economic costs.

This new report is one of the first in the world to look exclusively at the impact of COVID-19 on adolescents’ lives. It leverages data collected on the social, education, health, and economic effects of COVID-19 on adolescents in June 2020 and again in February 2021, and features contributions and recommendations from girls and boys who are part of advisory groups in Nairobi, Kisumu, Kilifi and Wajir counties, where the data was collected.

Since the outbreak of the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) that caused the coronavirus disease-19 (COVID-19), in December 2019, the infection has spread around the globe. Some of the risk factors include social distancing, mask wearing, hand washing with soap, obesity, diabetes, hypertension, asthma, cardiovascular disease, and dysbiosis. Evidence has shown the incidence of total infection and death rates to be lower in sub-Saharan Africa when compared with North Africa, Europe and North America and many other parts of the world. The higher the metabolic syndrome rate, the higher the risk of SARS-CoV-2 infection. Africa has a lower rate of metabolic syndrome risk than many other continents. This paradox has puzzled several in the biomedical and scientific communities. Published results of research have demonstrated the exciting correlation that the combination of young age of the population coupled with their native plant-based diet has lowered their risk factors. The plant-based diet include whole grains (millet, sorghum), legumes (black-eye peas, dry beans, soybean), vegetables, potato, sweet potato, yams, squash, banana, pumpkin seeds, and moringa leaves, and lower consumption of meat. The plant-based diet results in a different gut microbiota than of most of the rest of the world. This has a significant impact on the survival rate of other populations. The “plant-based diet” results in lower rates of obesity, diabetes and dysbiosis, which could contribute to lower and less severe infections. However, these hypotheses need to be supported by more clinical and biostatistics data.