Asymptomatic Carriers Are Associated with Shorter Negative Conversion Time in Children with Omicron Infections

EasyChair Preprint no. 11678

Abstract

Among the Omicron carriers, asymptomatic ones should be paid close attention to due to their silence in clinical symptoms and uncertainty in secondary transmission. The clinical characteristics associated with viral shedding of asymptomatic patients need to be carefully investigated especially for children.

Methods: We revisited the clinical data from 471 pediatric patients who have been infected with the SARS-CoV-2 Omicron variant in 2022. The cases were divided into symptomatic and asymptomatic groups according to clinical manifestations. Descriptive analysis and survival analysis were applied for the comparison between the groups.

Results: A total number of 333 patients were selected out of the original 471 children according to certain eligibility criteria, which resulted in 192 (57.7%) symptomatic and 141 (42.3%) asymptomatic cases. According to the univariate analysis, we discovered that the asymptomatic carriers had significantly shorter negative conversion time (NCT) (10±8 days) compared with the symptomatic ones (14±7 days) (p<0.001).

Conclusion: The NCT of asymptomatic patients, is shorter than the symptomatic ones, signifying that the asymptomatic patients may be equipped with shorter periods of self- or centralized isolation. These results could provide important implications for future policy-making or anti-virus treatment to lower the overall transmission risk to society.

Keyphrases: Asymptomatic, children, Negative Conversion, Omicron, survival analysis

@Booklet{EasyChair:11678,
  author = {Yang Xiang and Yang Zhou and Sicen Liu and Jinghua Wang and Fang Li and Siyuan Wang and Man Rao and Chuanchuan Yang and Buzhou Tang and Hongzhou Lu},
  title = {Asymptomatic Carriers Are Associated with Shorter Negative Conversion Time in Children with Omicron Infections},
  howpublished = {EasyChair Preprint no. 11678},

  year = {EasyChair, 2024}}