Trends in Pediatric Hospitalizations and Mortality during the COVID-19 Pandemic in an Urban Setting in Cameroon.

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic is a public health emergency and a challenge to the health systems of most countries worldwide. The initial response of the Cameroon government to the COVID-19 pandemic was to put a number of measures in place to stop the spread of the virus across the country. These measures, though beneficial in the fight against COVID-19 could have led to other detrimental health effects on the population, through a change in the pattern of hospitalizations and hospital outcomes, and all these were made worse by the fear of COVID within the population. We carried out a descriptive and retrospective cross-sectional study using hospitalization and mortality data from the pediatric ward of the Regional Hospital Bamenda, in Cameroon. We compared the data for the last 12 months before the pandemic (March 2019­February 2020) to that of the first 12 months during the pandemic in Cameroon (March 2020­February 2021). The comparison of the two periods showed that there was a statistically significant decline in pediatric hospitalizations during the first 12 months of the pandemic, by 19.03% (p = 0.00024). The hospital mortality rates before and during the pandemic were 1.6% and 1.9%, respectively, and the causes of these hospitalizations and mortality remained similar over both the periods.