Critical Paediatric Covid-19: Varied Presentations But Good Outcomes

International reports of the COVID-19 pandemic have described the relative sparing of children, both in case frequency1 and disease severity.2–4 The major presentation described in children is the paediatric inflammatory multisystem syndrome temporally associated with SARS-CoV-2 (PIMS-TS)—many of these children do not have evidence of PCR-positive viral disease and therefore may represent a postinfectious phenomenon.5 We describe our single-centre paediatric intensive care unit (PICU) experience of children who tested positive for severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) in the first 10 weeks of the pandemic in the UK, excluding those who met PIMS-TS criteria as these have been described elsewhere.\n\nA total of 313 children were admitted to our intensive care units (ICUs) from the 26 March 2020 to the 31 May 2020. Ninety-six children were suspected to have COVID-19 of which 24 (25%) children tested reverse transcription (RT-PCR) positive at admission with SARS-CoV-2 on nasopharyngeal aspirate. Thirteen children presented with a PIMS-TS …