Letter to the Editor: Delayed Presentation of Non-COVID-19 Patients During the COVID-19 Pandemic Is Not Limited to Children

Abstract

We read with interest the report about four minors who were diagnosed late with non-COVID-19 diseases during the COVID-19 pandemic. We would like to emphasize that, firstly, such delays are not limited to minors, and secondly, that also in minors should we distinguish the administrative and the physiological meanings of the term “child” and hence distinguish administratively defined “children” who bodily are already mature from those young patients who bodily are indeed still children. The 16-year-old patient that was presented to the emergency room with endocarditis was bodily no longer a child, although administratively and probably also psychologically, due to his Down syndrome, he was still a child. Two of the other patients, one with hemolytic anemia (2.5 years old) and one with Ewing sarcoma (4 years old), were still pre-pubertal children, while the 13-year-old minor with a septic hip was already adolescent. The author of the cited paper works in a pediatric department and reports those patients that he has seen during his work. However, in our view there is nothing specifically pediatric in his observations. Several recent papers discuss delays of diagnosis and treatment of non-COVID-19 diseases during the pandemic, including head and neck cancer, appendicitis, heart failure and septicemia, pulmonary thromboembolism,6 pyelonephritis, and cancer in general.8 Some patients in these papers are administratively still “children,” some are adults, and appendicitis is discussed in both.3,4 The delay the COVID-19 pandemic has caused in the timely diagnosis of various diseases is not a “pediatric” challenge, but a challenge for medicine in general.