Information and Training on the Use of Telemedicine in Pediatric Population: Consensus Document of the Italian Society of Telemedicine (SIT), of the Italian Society of Preventive and Social Pediatrics (SIPPS), of the Italian Society of Pediatric Primary Care (SICuPP), of the Italian Federation of Pediatric Doctors (FIMP), and of the Syndicate of Family Pediatrician Doctors (SIMPeF).

Telemedicine has entered the daily lives of doctors, although the digital skills of healthcare professionals still remain a goal to be achieved. For the purpose of a large-scale development of telemedicine, it is necessary to create trust in the services it can offer and to favor their acceptance by healthcare professionals and patients. In this context, information for the patient regarding the use of telemedicine, the benefits that can be derived from it, and the training of healthcare professionals and patients for the use of new technologies are fundamental aspects. This consensus document is a commentary that has the aim of defining the information on and training aspects of telemedicine for pediatric patients and their caregivers, as well as pediatricians and other health professionals who deal with minors. For the present and the future of digital healthcare, there is a need for a growth in the skills of professionals and a lifelong learning approach throughout the professional life. Therefore, information and training actions are important to guarantee the necessary professionalism and knowledge of the tools, as well as a good understanding of the interactive context in which they are used. Furthermore, medical skills can also be integrated with the skills of various professionals (engineers, physicists, statisticians, and mathematicians) to birth a new category of health professionals responsible for building new semiotics, identifying criteria for predictive models to be integrated into clinical practice, standardizing clinical and research databases, and defining the boundaries of social networks and new communication technologies within health services.

Coronavirus infections in children: from SARS and MERS to COVID-19, a narrative review of epidemiological and clinical features.

Emerging and re-emerging viruses represent an important challenge for global public health. In the 1960s, coronaviruses (CoVs) were recognized as disease agents in humans. In only two decades, three strains of CoVs have crossed species barriers rapidly emerging as human pathogens resulting in life-threatening disease with a pandemic potential: severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV) in 2002, Middle-East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV) in 2012 and the recently emerged SARS-CoV-2. This narrative review aims to provide a comprehensive overview of epidemiological, pathogenic and clinical features, along with diagnosis and treatment, of the ongoing epidemic of new coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) in the pediatric population in comparison to the first two previous deadly coronavirus outbreaks, SARS and MERS. Literature analysis showed that SARS-CoV, MERS-CoV and SARS-CoV-2 infections seem to affect children less commonly and less severely as compared with adults. Since children are usually asymptomatic, they are often not tested, leading to an underestimate of the true numbers infected. Most of the documented infections belong to family clusters, so the importance of children in transmitting the virus remains uncertain. Like in SARS and MERS infection, there is the possibility that children are not an important reservoir for novel CoVs and this may have important implications for school attendance. While waiting for an effective against SARS-CoV-2, further prevalence studies in paediatric age are needed, in order to clarify the role of children in different age groups in the spread of the infection.