JAMA Pediatrics has retracted a controversial 2023 paper on the incidence of long COVID in children after the authors discovered a raft of “coding” errors in their analysis that greatly underestimated the risk of the condition. 

The article "Post–COVID-19 Condition in Children" was written by a group of researchers in Canada led by Lyndsey Hahn, of the University of Alberta, in Edmonton. According to the authors, the incidence of long covid in kids was “strikingly low”, occurring in just 0.4% of young patients. But those reassuring findings hinged on several errors in the analysis that made the incidence of long COVID in children look less than a third of what the researchers should have reported.

One coding error led to the miscategorization of children for whom data were missing to be considered asymptomatic. Another error led to the exclusion of 15 children because of a mistaken date cut-off. The researchers also identified coding errors affecting their analysis of symptoms before and after infection, and in the duration of fevers.

The retraction notice concludes with an apology to the readers and editors of the journal, and states all seven authors agreed with the decision to retract the work.