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The Pedi-COVID Rx Podcast Series: Who’s High Risk? Identifying Vulnerable Pediatric Populations

Infectious diseases

Respiratory medicine

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Description

This program is supported by an independent education grant from Pfizer Global Medical Grants. This online education program has been designed solely for U.S. healthcare professionals only. The content is not available for healthcare professionals in any other countries.

Join leading paediatric infectious disease expert Dr Flor M. Muñoz for the first episode of this podcast series, which explores the key medical and social risk factors associated with severe COVID-19 in children and offers practical guidance on recognising high-risk paediatric patients in clinical settings, alongside practical insights from a patient advocate that illuminate real-world barriers to care, diagnostic challenges, and the importance of compassionate, culturally responsive communication in clinical settings.

Accreditation: 0.25 AMA PRA Category 1 Credits™

Session Highlights:

Who’s High Risk? Learn how to apply age-based criteria, comorbidity profiles, and social determinants of health to accurately identify paediatric patients at increased risk for severe COVID-19 and support informed clinical decision-making.
Acting Early: Review the value of timely evaluation, access to respiratory viral testing, and early treatment pathways in reducing the risk of hospitalisation and serious complications among high-risk children.
Beyond the Acute Phase: Understand how to recognise, monitor, and manage longer-term complications such as MIS-C and long COVID, with an emphasis on prevention, vaccination, and coordinated follow-up care.
Patient and Caregiver Perspective: Hear directly from a caregiver of a high-risk child, highlighting real-world barriers to care, the emotional impact of COVID-19, and the critical importance of compassionate, clear communication and partnership between clinicians and families.

Who Should Attend:

U.S.-based clinicians caring for children, including:

Pediatricians
Pediatric Infectious Disease Specialists
Family Medicine and Internal Medicine Physicians
Primary and Urgent Care Providers
Advanced Practice Providers (NPs, PAs)

Faculty

Dr Flor M. Muñoz is an Associate Professor of Paediatrics, Infectious Diseases, and Molecular Virology and Microbiology at Baylor College of Medicine and Texas Children’s Hospital. She is a physician-scientist whose work centres on respiratory viral infections, vaccine safety and effectiveness, maternal immunisation, and the prevention of severe disease in high-risk paediatric and immunocompromised populations. Dr Muñoz also contributes to national and international advisory committees and research networks focused on immunisation and infectious disease prevention.

Heather Burrell is a patient advocate who contributes insights informed by the caregiver experience.

Continuing Education Information

Commercial support: This program is supported by an independent education grant from Pfizer Global Medical Grants.

This continuing education activity will be provided by AffinityCE and MedAll. This activity will provide continuing education credit for physicians. A statement of participation is available to other attendees.

Disclosures

Dr Flor M. Muñoz has disclosed financial relationships within the past 24 months with the following ineligible companies: Pfizer through service on Data and Safety Monitoring Boards for RSV and Group B Streptococcus vaccines, with Sanofi as a member of an adjudication committee, and with Merck through consulting activities as part of a technical advisory group. Her roles as an investigator on paediatric COVID-19 vaccine studies for Pfizer, as well as her consulting relationship with AstraZeneca, ended within the past 24 months.

These disclosures are provided in accordance with ACCME standards to ensure transparency and uphold the integrity of continuing education. Dr Muñoz intends to discuss non-FDA-approved uses of drug products and/or devices and their unlabelled indications during this activity. She will clearly disclose to the audience when such discussions take place.

Heather Burrell has no relevant financial relationships with ineligible companies to disclose.

AffinityCE staff, MedAll staff, as well as planners and reviewers, have no relevant financial relationships with ineligible companies to disclose.

Mitigation of Relevant Financial Relationships

AffinityCE adheres to the ACCME’s Standards for Integrity and Independence in Accredited Continuing Education. Any individuals in a position to control the content of a CME activity, including faculty, planners, reviewers, or others, are required to disclose all relevant financial relationships with ineligible companies. Relevant financial relationships were mitigated by the peer review of content by non-conflicted reviewers prior to the commencement of the program.

Activity Accreditation for Health Professions

Physicians

This activity has been planned and implemented in accordance with the accreditation requirements and policies of the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education (ACCME) through the joint providership of AffinityCE and MedAll. AffinityCE is accredited by the ACCME to provide continuing medical education for physicians.

AffinityCE designates this enduring material for a maximum of 0.25 AMA PRA Category 1 Credits™. Physicians should claim only the credit commensurate with the extent of their participation in the activity.

Physician Assistants

This activity has been planned and implemented in accordance with the accreditation requirements and policies of the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education (ACCME) through the joint providership of AffinityCE and MedAll. AffinityCE is accredited by the ACCME to provide continuing medical education for physicians.

AffinityCE designates this enduring material for a maximum of 0.25 AMA PRA Category 1 Credits™. Physician assistants should claim only the credit commensurate with the extent of their participation in the activity.

Nurse Practitioners

This activity has been planned and implemented in accordance with the accreditation requirements and policies of the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education (ACCME) through the joint providership of AffinityCE and MedAll. AffinityCE is accredited by the ACCME to provide continuing medical education for physicians.

AffinityCE designates this enduring material a maximum of 0.25 AMA PRA Category 1 Credits™. Nurse practitioners should claim only the credit commensurate with the extent of their participation in the activity.

Nurses & Other Professionals

All other health care professionals completing this continuing education activity will be issued a statement of participation indicating the number of hours of continuing education credit. This may be used for professional education CE credit. Please consult your accrediting organization or licensing board for their acceptance of this CE activity.

System Requirements

Mobile device (e.g., large-format smart phone; laptop or tablet computer) or desktop computer with a video display of at least 1024 × 768 pixels at 24-bit color depth, capable of connecting to the Internet at broadband or faster speeds, with a current version Internet browser and popular document viewing software (e.g., Microsoft Office, PDF viewer, image viewer) installed. Support for streaming or downloadable audio-visual materials (e.g., streaming MP4, MP3 audio) in hardware and software may be required to view, review, or participate in portions of the program

Unapproved and/or off-label use disclosure

AffinityCE/MedAll requires CE faculty to disclose to the participants:

1. When products or procedures being discussed are off-label, unlabeled, experimental, and/or investigational (not US Food and Drug Administration [FDA] approved); and

2. Any limitations on the information presented, such as data that are preliminary or that represent ongoing research, interim analyses, and/or unsupported opinion.

Participation Costs

There is no cost to participate in this program.

CME Inquiries

For all CME policy-related inquiries, please contact us at ce@affinityced.com.

This continuing education activity is active starting December 16th 2025 and will expire on November 26th 2026. Estimated time to complete this activity: 15 minutes.

Learning objectives

Stratify pediatric patients who test positive for COVID-19 by systematically integrating current CDC high-risk criteria with individual comorbidity profiles (e.g., obesity, cardiopulmonary disease, immunosuppression) to determine eligibility for antiviral treatment.

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Computer generated transcript

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The following transcript was generated automatically from the content and has not been checked or corrected manually.

Welcome to the Quick Consult podcast, brought to you by Metall. Before starting this podcast, please review the faculty information, disclosure statements, and learning objectives using the link in the episode description. To claim your CME credit, complete the evaluation using the link in the episode description. This podcast is a continuing education activity managed and accredited by Affinity CE in collaboration with Metall. This activity is supported by an independent medical education grant from Pfizer Global Medical Grants. Welcome to the PD COVID treatment podcast series, an accessible evidence-based program designed to build provider confidence in recognizing, treating, and managing high-risk pediatric COVID-19 patients. This series is part of the accredited CME initiative, PE COVID treatment protecting high-risk pediatric patients brought to you by Mal Education in collaboration with Affinity CE. I'm your host, Doctor Phil McIlnay, and today we're honored to speak with Doctor Fleur Munoz, associate professor of pediatrics and infectious Diseases at Baylor College of Medicine and an expert in pediatric infectious diseases and vaccines. Doctor Munoz, thank you so much for joining us for our first episode. Thank you so much, Phil. Thank you for having me. In this episode we're gonna be diving into who's high risk, identifying vulnerable pediatric populations. Let's start with the big picture. Why is it so critical for frontline healthcare professionals like pediatricians, family medicine doctors, and urgent care providers to have a high level of confidence in pediatric risk stratification for COVID-19 today? Very important point uh to start with. And the reason is because even though we have passed the peak of the pandemic, COVID-19 continues to be an important problem for certain populations, and that includes within our pediatric populations, um, the very young. But also, children and adolescents who do have underlying medical conditions that put them at high risk for complications from COVID-19. So, the observation of uh post-pandemic period. has been that um some of these high-risk groups continue to have severe disease and potentially risk for um admissions or hospitalization, and complications from COVID-19. And could you walk us through the primary medical conditions that consistently put children at high risk for severe COVID-19 outcomes? Absolutely. These are very similar to the conditions that we see in the adults. So, children and adolescents who have, for example, cardiopulmonary disease, so chronic heart or lung disease, are going to be at high risk of complications from COVID-19. That we have uh children that might be immunosuppressed for different reasons, uh, either primary immune suppression, uh, or acquired immunosuppression for treatment, uh, for example, uh, for a cancer treatment or, um, patients that have received an organ transplant or a bone marrow transplant would be immunosuppressed and at risk. And then we have uh other conditions uh that are, again, similar to adults, such as metabolic disease, uh, diabetes, uh, patients with chronic kidney, uh or other uh organ disease. We have obesity as another important risk factor. And certainly, anyone who has, um, Similar to, to the flu, uh, any condition that would result in an inability to clear the respiratory, uh, oral secretions would be potentially also at risk of chronic lung disease and, uh, complications from COVID-19. That's a really clear stratification and really helpful. What about age? Does age remain a significant independent risk factor for critical disease? It is. Actually, in pediatrics, we do have a follow-up, even in the post peak of the pandemic, now that we have endemic COVID-19. Children under 2 years of age, so 0 to 2 years of age. are those who have um higher rates of infection with symptomatic disease and also potentially again, Admission to the hospital. And within that age group, again, not necessarily because they have underlying conditions. It's after 2 years of age that we see a higher risk for, for children that have underlying uh chronic conditions. But uh within the under 2s, you see that 0 to 6 months of age children are the ones that have the highest rates of complications and hospitalization. rates that are um similar or higher than influenza at that age, and even um, higher than most adults, uh, just because they're under 6 months of age, we do have a risk for admission in the hospital similar to adults over 65 years of age, for example. So, clearly, uh, age in and of itself, the very young remain at high risk for COVID-19, uh, serious disease. We've talked a little bit about the medical risk factors. Um, in our program, we're also talking about social risk factors. How could, how should clinicians integrate socioeconomic or social factors into their risk assessment and care planning? Yeah. If there is something we learned with COVID-19 is that there were some groups that were clearly at higher risk of uh disease and complications from COVID-19, even though uh they did not have some of these underlying risk factors that we just discussed, and that had to do with um different um socioeconomic issues. Um, certain underrepresented groups and minorities had Uh, probably issues related to access to medical care, access to vaccines, and um it was very clear that it was important to reach out and have a representation of these populations, in, for example, the clinical trials, and then also the implementation and rollout. Out of vaccines and treatments when they became available. So, I do think that even now, um, during this pandemic period, we do have to be very much aware of these uh social or socio-economic factors that could put uh certain groups at risk, uh, because of, um, not just, you know, their, their living conditions, but also their access to, to a medical, timely medical attention. Doctor Menez, that perspective is really invaluable. To close out this episode, what are the two main action items you would want clinicians to take away regarding risk stratification? I think that an important message today regarding COVID-19 is that we must not forget that even in the pediatric population, there will be certain groups at risk for a severe disease from COVID-19. And that these groups would require our special attention regarding informing parents, uh, on the, about the risk, and also offering the opportunity for these patients uh to be able to be protected against uh COVID-19. Because we do have the tools, and so if we are aware of who is at risk, we should be able to provide an option for these families to um avoid and prevent, not just being infected, but again, the, the higher risk of these diseases, uh, because the Consequences here, the goal of, of, of prevention uh in these high-risk groups is to um avoid having severe disease. We, we cannot prevent infection altogether, but the tools that we have at hand are able to um reduce the risk of complications from COVID-19 today. Doctor Munoz, thank you so much for joining us. We're very grateful to have Heather, a mother of a child who has experienced COVID-19, join us briefly. Um, from your perspective as a caregiver navigating the healthcare system for a high-risk child during the pandemic, what is the single most important action a clinician can take to make the initial visit and risk discussion less intimidating and more effective? I think probably what would have the most impact would be showing that they have compassion for what I'm going through, um, conveying empathy in the conversation and not being so technical and almost removed from the conversation that we're having. I mean, it was quite emotional for me to be going.