COVID Positive Infants May Develop UTIs

According to a study published late last week in JAMA Network Open, compared to feverish infants who tested negative for COVID-19, a lower proportion of COVID Positive Infants aged 8 to 60 days had co-occurring urinary tract infections (UTIs), bacteremia without meningitis, and bacterial meningitis.

Bacteremia refers to the presence of bacteria in the blood, whereas meningitis refers to inflammation of the membranes that protect the brain and spinal cord.

The study, led by a Yale School of Medicine researcher, was part of a quality-improvement experiment that ran from November 1, 2020, to October 31, 2022, at 106 institutions in the United States and Canada. Participants were full-term, febrile, but otherwise healthy newborns screened for COVID-19 who did not have bronchiolitis (lung infection in infants and young children).

Among the 14,402 COVID Positive Infants, 58.4% were 29 to 60 days old, 56.5% were boys, 26.1% were White, 25.0% were Hispanic, 13.3% were of another race, 12.5% were of unknown race, and 9.4% were Black.

Bacterial infections differed according to age and inflammatory indicators.
Compared to negative infants, a reduced proportion of COVID-positive newborns experienced UTI (0.8% vs 7.6%), bacteremia without meningitis (0.2% vs 2.1%), or bacterial meningitis (0.1% vs 0.5%).

Among infants diagnosed with COVID-19 aged 29 to 60 days, 0.4% had UTI and less than 0.1% had bacteremia or meningitis. In SARS-CoV-2-positive newborns, those with normal levels of inflammatory markers (IMs) had a lower proportion of bacteremia and/or bacterial meningitis than those with aberrant IMs (0.1% vs 1.8%).

“It is important to note that the prevalence of concomitant bacterial infection varied by age group.”

“Although the prevalence of UTI and IBI [invasive bacterial infection] may be low enough for some clinicians to consider deferring further testing for bacterial infection in SARS-CoV-2–positive infants, depending on their risk tolerance and practice setting, it is important to note that the prevalence of concomitant bacterial infection varied by age group and whether IMs were normal or abnormal,” the study authors wrote.

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