Publisher Correction: Epidemiological characterization of SARS-CoV-2 variants in children over the four COVID-19 waves and correlation with clinical presentation

Performance evaluation of a new on-demand molecular test for the rapid identification of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 in pediatric and adult patients

“…Yet, the commercial RT-PCR test we used as a reference is the current benchmark for clinical SARS-CoV-2 diagnosis in emergency settings, ensuring the clinical significance of our study in the context of commercially available, CE-marked assays. In addition, SARS-CoV-2 variants have not been routinely tested in the analyzed samples, yet (a) all samples were collected in the period from January to March 2022, when SARS-CoV-2 infections in Italy were almost entirely attributed to Omicron VOC (Rapporto, 2022), and (b) we sequenced a remarkable number of samples in that period and confirmed this rate of variants (Alteri et al, 2022).…”

“…In fact, both at the health facility and community levels, diagnosis of the virus is the first and fundamental step toward its containment. During pandemic, children have been supposed to actively spread SARS-CoV-2 in elderly population and thus many concerns arose about the ability to accurately detect eventual children-related viral variants by PCR methods, previous study demonstrated that genomic SARS-CoV-2 variability was similar across various age categories ( Alteri et al, 2022 ). In line with their findings, we decided to address this aspect by performing an assay comparison in our pediatric clinical setting.…”