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Aim: Emergency room admissions have decreased globally during the COVID‐19 pandemic, particularly for respiratory diseases. We evaluated hospital admissions for respiratory diseases in the first year of the Italian pandemic and compared them with the corresponding period in 2016–2017. Methods: The study was carried out at the Sapienza University in Rome, Italy, and covered 9 March to 28 February 2020–2021 and 2016–2017. We tested 85 hospitalised children who were negative for the virus that causes COVID‐19 in 2020–2021 and compared them with 476 hospitalised children from 2016–2017, as we had also tested nasal washing samples for 14 respiratory viruses during that period. Results: Hospitalisations for acute respiratory tract infections were 82.2% lower in 2020–2021 than 2016–2017. The respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) and several other viruses were detected less frequently during the pandemic. An extraordinary finding was that rhinoviruses remained seasonal. In 2020–2021, we detected a virus in 54.1% of the hospitalised children: rhinoviruses in 41, RSV in 4 and other viruses in 1. This was significantly lower than the 71.6% in 2016–2017: RSV in 130, rhinoviruses in 128 and other viruses in 83. Conclusion: Pandemic measures dramatically reduced childhood respiratory infections, particularly RSV, but were less effective at reducing rhinoviruses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lung ultrasound has become increasingly used in both adult and pediatric populations, allowing the rapid evaluation of many lung and pleura diseases. This popularity is due to several advantages of the method such as the low cost, rapidity, lack of ionizing radiation, availability of bedside and repeatability of the method. These features are even more important after the outbreak of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, given the possibility of recognizing through ultrasound the signs of interstitial lung syndrome typical of pneumonia caused by the virus. The purpose of this paper is to review the available evidence of lung ultrasound (LUS) in children and its main applications in pediatric diseases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]