PHAC COVID Study

Study Summary

The course of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) related disease in children is not yet well understood. This active surveillance program will recruit children who present to an Emergency Department (ED) for medical care in 15 pediatric emergency departments across Canada – all of which are members of Pediatric Emergency Research Canada (PERC). The goal is to recruit 4 pediatric patients per day at each of the 15 sites. Each day, research team members will receive a list of all pediatric patients who have been tested for SARS-CoV-2 on the preceding day and site study coordinators will use this list to contact the families of these patients by telephone. We will then recruit them into the PERC - Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) Surveillance Registry which will include data regarding exposure history, clinical symptoms, the ED visit and outcomes.

Follow-up phone-calls will occur 14 and 90 days following the index ED visit. The 14 day call will explore short-term complications; the 90 day call will evaluate chronic symptoms. The registry will include both SARS-CoV-2 test positive and negative children thereby creating a detailed repository of data that allows us to compare children with COVID-19 infection to those infected with other viruses. Sites will attempt to enroll all SARS-CoV-2 positive case. No in-person assessment is required as part of this study. Data will be collected from caregivers and from the chart review.

This PERC PHAC COVID-19 Surveillance Registry is supported by a service contract between PHAC and the PERC network. There will be no data collected from primary and secondary assessment centres; all patients recruited to provide data for this registry will have been tested in a PERC ED. This surveillance study intends to recruit the target sample size during a 3 month recruiting period.

Objectives

1. To fully evaluate the clinical characteristics and outcomes of SARS-CoV-2 infected children
2. To describe and compare health care resource utilization for patient management (e.g. isolation, laboratory testing, imaging, and supportive care) of both confirmed SARS-CoV-2 infected children and those that have SARS-CoV2 test-negative infections

Principal Study Investigators: Dr. Stephen Freedman and Dr. Roger Zemek

Project Lead: Kate Winston

Study Team: Dr. Vikram Sabhaney, Dr. Andrew Dixon, Dr. Ahmed Mater, Dr. Darcy Beer, Dr. Naveen Poonai, Dr. April Kam, Dr. Gabrielle Freire, Dr. Richard VanWylick, Dr. Isabelle Gagnon, Dr. Jocelyn Gravel, Dr. Simon Berthelot, Dr. Jason Emsley, Dr. Robert Porter, Tiffany Smith, Tara Beitel