Yong Chen, PhD and Jeffrey S. Morris, PhD have co-led a new article published in The Lancet Infectious Diseases. The paper examines the long-term health risks of COVID-19 reinfection in children and adolescents using one of the largest pediatric datasets to date.
This work, conducted as part of the NIH-funded RECOVER Initiative, analyzed data from more than 465,000 patients across 40 pediatric hospitals. The study found that children and adolescents who experienced a second SARS-CoV-2 infection had more than double the risk of developing long COVID compared to those with only a single infection. Reinfection was also associated with elevated risks for serious conditions such as myocarditis, kidney injury, and blood clots.
The study highlights how Penn Medicine’s strengths in AI and data science, paired with clinical investigation, can generate powerful and timely insights into urgent public health questions. By integrating rigorous statistical and machine learning methods with large-scale real-world data and clinical expertise, the Center for Health AI and Synthesis of Evidence (CHASE) team delivered one of the most comprehensive evaluations to date of the long-term consequences of COVID reinfection in children. This work builds on their earlier earlier work on characterizing long COVID, assessing vaccine effectiveness, and their interrelationships.
This recognition in The Lancet Infectious Diseases and its feature coverage in Time Magazine and The New York Times highlights both the pressing clinical implications of reinfection and Penn’s leadership in shaping national and global understanding of pediatric long COVID.
Funded by The National Institutes of Health (NIH) RECOVER Initiative