A pediatric case of exudative erythema multiforme probably associated with asymptomatic COVID-19

COVID-19 is a pandemic involving severe acute respiratory syndrome-coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, which started in China at the end of 2019 and has spread globally. Among COVID-19 patients, 17.8% are under 20 years of age. Most children infected with SARS-CoV-2 are asymptomatic or only oligosymptomatic and can easily be overlooked. We followed an 11-year-old boy showing exudative erythema multiforme, which appeared during isolation at home following a positive polymerase chain reaction (PCR) test for COVID-19. Our case, although otherwise asymptomatic, showed typical clinical and histological manifestations of the erythema multiforme-like lesions associated with COVID-19. The presence of such an asymptomatic SARS-CoV-2 carrier who developed erythema multiforme-like skin lesions provides the possibility that some undefined infectious organisms, such as SARS-CoV-2, could be the origin of exudative erythema multiforme cases without any apparent cause.