What's New With the Old Coronaviruses?

Abstract

Coronaviruses contribute to the burden of respiratory diseases in children, frequently manifesting in upper respiratory symptoms considered to be part of the "common cold." Recent epidemics of novel coronaviruses recognized in the 21st century have highlighted issues of zoonotic origins of transmissible respiratory viruses and potential transmission, disease, and mortality related to these viruses. In this review, we discuss what is known about the virology, epidemiology, and disease associated with pediatric infection with the common community-acquired human coronaviruses, including species 229E, OC43, NL63, and HKU1, and the coronaviruses responsible for past world-wide epidemics due to severe acute respiratory syndrome and Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus.

Keywords: COVID-19; MERS; SARS; coronavirus; pediatric respiratory viruses.

Figure 1.

Examples of HCoV shedding patterns in young children attending child care centers [47, 48]. Children attending group childcare were tested prospectively for respiratory viruses at each acute respiratory illness (ARI). Swabs were collected weekly from ARI onset until symptoms were nonworsening and swabs were negative by real-time-polymerase chain reaction [47]. Human coronavirus (HCoV)–positive swabs (for all species) are represented by filled circles, and negative swabs are represented by open circles. Weeks on x-axis were calculated as weeks since symptom onset with an HCoV (+) acute respiratory illness. The lower limit of positivity was set at 1000 copies/mL for this analysis. Sequencing of HCoV isolates was not performed.

Figure 2.

Cumulative incidence of coronavirus infection in children after allogeneic hematopoietic cell transplantation at Seattle Children’s Hospital by age (N = 404). Numbers below x-axis show the number of patients at risk by age (0–5 years vs 6–17 years). Of note, OC43 and HKU1 were detected in bronchoalveolar lavage specimens from 2 infants, respectively.