COVID-19 Pandemic in the Czech Republic: Substantial Decline of the Demand for Pediatric Healthcare Services
Abstract
Since December 2019, the SARS-CoV-2 virus, a beta coronavirus which can cause the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has been spreading around the world. SARS-CoV-2 is highly infectious, thereby the entire population is generally susceptible.
This virus spread throughout almost the entire world quite rapidly. At the time of writing this article, COVID-19 has been confirmed in most countries including the Czech Republic (CZ).
The main routes of transmission are respiratory droplets and patient-to-patient contact. In CZ, on the 1st of March, 2020, the first case of COVID-19 was confirmed.
During the 75 days that followed, a total of 356,515 individuals were tested, 8,480 had positive COVID-19 polymerase chain reaction tests (Ministry of Health of the Czech Republic 2020). In the pediatric population (<=15 years), 512 (6.2%) patients were detected, fortunately, no deaths were reported (Ministry of Health of the Czech Republic 2020).
A lot of government restrictions were performed, e. g. school closures (from the 11th of March, 2020), limited possibilities of travelling due to border closures (from the 16th of March, 2020), and the mandatory wearing of face masks or covering of the nose and mouth in the general population (from the 18th of March, 2020). During this time, we observed a lower number of pediatric patients and a different distribution of diagnoses than per usual.
Therefore, the aim of this study was to analyze the number of inpatients/outpatients and spectrum of inpatients before and during the COVID-19 pandemic.