findings of pneumonia. No significant differences were found between the two pneumonia study groups for any clinical and laboratory parameters, except for C-reactive protein (CRP). Of course, both pneumonia groups showed increased CRP values; however, the COVID-19 pneumonia group 1 showed a significantly higher increase of CRP compared to group 2. CONCLUSION In our case series of children assessed for SARS-CoV-2 infection based on contact tracing, the acute inflammatory response and, in detail, CRP increase resulted to be more pronounced in COVID-19 children with pneumonia than in children with SARS-CoV-2-unrelated pneumonia. However, because of multiple limitations of this study, larger, controlled and more complete clinical studies are needed to verify this finding. ©The Author(s) 2022.