More on CT features in children with COVID-19.

To the Editors,

We read with great interest the study by Simoni and colleagues (Volume 64, Issue 5). In short, the authors aimed to describe the chest CT features reported in children with confirmed COVID‐19 infection. We want to congratulate the authors for establishing a timely and informative systematic review and shed some light on this infection in a particular group. Certainly, the findings of Simoni et al. are an extremely commendable achievement and add to the literature on pediatric SARS‐CoV‐2 infections. While we agree with the overall conclusions, we wish to draw their attention to a certain aspect.

A total of nine articles that meet the inclusion criteria were included for the data extraction and in the final analysis. However, the authors should exclude studies suspected of containing duplicate reporting as duplication can give a potentially biased picture. More precisely, some children may have been included in multiple publications, as the period of enrolment overlaps for reports from the same hospital. The data from Sun et al., Xia et al., and Ma et al. were reported by the same hospital (Wuhan Children's Hospital) with the periods of recruitment overlapped.

Isolated case reports or repeat case series from the same hospital should be excluded to avoid duplicate data from large retrospective studies. Studies suspected of including duplicate reporting can be identified based on hospital location, recruitment periods, and children’s characteristics. Therefore, we humbly suggest that the authors extract the hospital’s name. When a hospital had published their cases more than once, if the recruitment periods overlapped, only the most informative study with the bigger sample size was included to minimize the possibility of double counting.

Funding

This manuscript did not receive any funding.

Conflicts of interest

The authors declare no competing interests

Author contributions

MW conceived the design of the comments and made critical revision. JC and YL drafted the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final version for publication.