As of March 10, 2020, the 2019 novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) has been responsible for more than 110,000 infections and 4000 deaths worldwide, but data regarding the epidemiologic characteristics and clinical features of infected children are limited.^1-3 A recent review of 72,314 cases by the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention showed that less than 1% of the cases were in children younger than 10 years of age.² In order to determine the spectrum of disease in children, we evaluated children infected with SARS-CoV-2 and treated at the Wuhan Children’s Hospital, the only center assigned by the central government for treating infected children under 16 years of age in Wuhan. Both symptomatic and asymptomatic children with known contact with persons having confirmed or suspected SARS-CoV-2 infection were evaluated. Nasopharyngeal or throat swabs were obtained for detection of SARS-CoV-2 RNA by established methods.⁴ The clinical outcomes were monitored up to March 8, 2020.

Background: Illumina sequencing platform is widely used in genome research. Sequence reads quality assessment and control are needed for downstream analysis. However, software that provides efficient quality assessment and versatile filtration methods is still lacking. Results: We have developed a toolkit named HTQC - abbreviation of High-Throughput Quality Control - for sequence reads quality control, which consists of six programs for reads quality assessment, reads filtration and generation of graphic reports. Conclusions: The HTQC toolkit can generate reads quality assessment faster than existing tools, providing guidance for reads filtration utilities that allow users to choose different strategies to remove low quality reads.