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. 2021 Aug 14;10(6):742-744.
doi: 10.1093/jpids/piab013.

The Impact of Social Distancing for COVID-19 Upon Diagnosis of Kawasaki Disease

Stanford Shulman  1 , Bessey Geevarghese  1 , Kwang-Youn Kim  2 , Anne Rowley  1
Affiliations

The Impact of Social Distancing for COVID-19 Upon Diagnosis of Kawasaki Disease

Stanford Shulman et al. J Pediatric Infect Dis Soc. .

Abstract

Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) mitigation policies have been associated with profound decreases in diagnoses of common childhood respiratory infections. A leading theory of etiology of Kawasaki disease (KD) is that it is triggered by presently unidentified ubiquitous respiratory agent. We document that mitigation policies instituted in mid-March 2020 were associated with strikingly fewer diagnoses of KD in April-December 2020 compared with the same period in the previous 8 years (P = .01), a >67% decline. This finding supports the hypothesis that KD is caused by a respiratory-transmitted agent.

Keywords: COVID-19; Kawasaki disease; mitigation; respiratory transmission; social distancing.

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Figures

Figure 1.
Figure 1.
The number of Kawasaki disease diagnoses from 2012 to 2020 with mean and 95% confidence intervals is shown in vertical columns for January 1 to March 31 and April 1 to December 31, with 2020 numbers shown by X and years 2012–2019 shown by black circles. The April 1 to December 31, 2020, value is significantly lower than the corresponding 2012 to 2019 data (P = .008), while the January 1 to March 31, 2020, value is not significantly different from previous years.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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