What is already known about this topic? Coronavirus disease 2019 has a mild disease course in children and adolescents. Chronic respiratory conditions, including asthma, have been suggested as risk factors; however, asthma in children is highly variable in both triggers and severity.What does this article add to our knowledge? During the pandemic, pediatric asthma services limited consultations and established virtual clinics. However, respondents perceived their patients' asthma control to be retained or even improved, while treatment adherence was considered increased. Children with asthma were not disproportionately affected by coronavirus disease 2019.How does this study impact current management guidelines? Trigger avoidance and treatment adherence can rapidly improve asthma control in children, even under lockdown pressure. Children/adolescents with asthma do not appear to need additional prophylactic measures from coronavirus disease 2019 when asthma is well-treated.

Acute bronchiolitis is responsible for high morbidity in infants. Club cell protein 16 kDa (CC16) is a major pneumoprotein secreted by club cells of the bronchial epithelium and eliminated by the renal pathway. CC16 seems to be a biomarker of epithelial damage in asthma. However, its value as a marker of acute bronchiolitis severity and later recurrent wheezing are uncertain, especially the value of its urinary assay for this purpose. A prospective, observational, analytical study was conducted at Clermont‐Ferrand University Hospital to correlate serum CC16 level with clinical severity of bronchiolitis in hospitalized infants aged less than 1 year. We analyzed correlations between serum and urinary CC16, CC16 levels and Wainwright score, immediate morbidity due to bronchiolitis, causal viruses, and recurrent wheezing 1 year after inclusion. In 166 infants, serum CC16 did not correlate with acute bronchiolitis severity (P = .49), but urinary CC16 did (P < .001). In multivariate analysis, urinary CC16 correlated mainly with urinary retinol binding protein (RBP; r = 0.70; P < .001). The logCC16u/logRBPu ratio correlated significantly with severity (P = .02). CC16 levels were not correlated with recurrent wheezing at 1 year. Urinary CC16 could be a useful biomarker in acute bronchiolitis for specific indications. This noninvasive assay would be particularly useful in the young infant population. Several factors must be taken into account in its interpretation, mainly tubular function. Further studies are needed to assess these factors.

Enterovirus D68 (EV-D68) has emerged as an agent of epidemic respiratory illness and acute flaccid myelitis in the paediatric population but data are lacking in adult patients. We performed a 4.5-year single-centre retrospective study of all patients who tested positive for EV-D68 and analysed full-length EV-D68 genomes of the predominant clades B3 and D1. Between 1 June 2014, and 31 December 2018, 73 of the 11,365 patients investigated for respiratory pathogens tested positive for EV-D68, of whom 20 (27%) were adults (median age 53.7 years [IQR 34.0–65.7]) and 53 (73%) were children (median age 1.9 years [IQR 0.2–4.0]). The proportion of adults increased from 12% in 2014 to 48% in 2018 (p = 0.01). All adults had an underlying comorbidity factor, including chronic lung disease in 12 (60%), diabetes mellitus in six (30%), and chronic heart disease in five (25%). Clade D1 infected a higher proportion of adults than clades B3 and B2 (p = 0.001). Clade D1 was more divergent than clade B3: 5 of 19 amino acid changes in the capsid proteins were located in putative antigenic sites. Adult patients with underlying conditions are more likely to present with severe complications associated with EV-D68, notably the emergent clade D1.

Serum sRAGE levels are decreased in acute bronchiolitis but not correlated with disease severity. sRAGE levels should be age-adjusted in infants. Serum sRAGE levels measured in the setting of acute bronchiolitis were not predictive of recurrent wheezing.

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