Letter re: Response to Letter to the Editor Regarding “Adolescent Trauma During the COVID Pandemic: Just Like Adults,Children,or Someone Else?”

We thank the reader for their insightful comments regarding our recent study entitled “Adolescent Trauma During the COVID Pandemic: Just Like Adults, Children, or Someone Else?” ¹ and appreciate the opportunity to respond.

First, we agree that the adolescent trauma patients described in this study do not necessarily represent the traumatic experiences of the entire adolescent population. In other words, many adolescents experience levels of trauma that do not require evaluation at a trauma center. However, we do believe our study provides useful information about the most severely injured adolescents during the pandemic.

With regards to including a broader time period in our analysis, changes to the electronic medical record at many of the institutions involved in this study prevented the inclusion of earlier time periods. We agree that this somewhat limits the interpretation of our results and believe the addition of historical data will be important to include in future studies.

Last, regarding the lack of comparisons to other populations, many of these authors have participated in additional studies focusing on other age groups including children, adults, and the elderly.^1-4 While the current study did not make direct comparisons with these other populations, the aforementioned studies found an increase in penetrating trauma rates among adult trauma patients after stay-at-home orders, ² but no difference in penetrating trauma rates among pediatric trauma patients after stay-at-home orders, ³ similar to our findings among adolescent trauma patients. ¹ That said, we hope other investigators will continue to build upon this work and help provide a more complete picture of the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on adolescents.