Effect of COVID-19 on Emergency Department Visits by Pediatric Burn Patients in Korea: Retrospective Observational Study

It’s been over a year since the outbreak of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), which is still a global public health challenge. Many countries have implemented social distancing to prevent the risk of infection with COVID-19. As a result, children spend more time at home. Home is where burns among children occur predominantly. We hypothesized that the changes in lifestyle due to the COVID-19 outbreak may have affected pediatric emergency department (PED) visits by children sustaining burn injuries. This study was a long-term multicenter observational study. Pediatric burn patients were defined in accordance with International Classification of Disease, Tenth Edition (ICD-10). We investigated the trend in PED weekly visits by pediatric burn patients before and after the outbreak of COVID-19 and trends in the proportion of visits according to burn severity based on segmented regression analysis. The data were adjusted for seasonality due to seasonal variation in the visits. Over the past 3 years, the proportion of pediatric burn patients tended to decrease. However, it increased in the fourth week of January 2020, when COVID-19 was first confirmed in Korea. In particular, the proportion of PED visits to pediatric burn patients with severe burns increased after the COVID-19 epidemic. Our study showed increases in the proportion of PED visits among pediatric burn patients due to the spread of COVID-19. Many of these burn accidents mainly occur at home, suggesting the need for parental intervention to prevent the risk of burn injuries among children.