The early period of the COVID-19 pandemic limited access to HIV services for children and adolescents living with HIV (C/ALHIV). To determine progress in providing care and treatment services, we describe viral load coverage (VLC) and suppression (VLS) (<1000 copies/ mL) rates during the COVID-19 pandemic in 12 United States President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR)-supported countries. Data for children (0-9 years) and adolescents (10-19 years) on VLC and VLS were analyzed for 12 sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries between 2019 (pre-COVID-19) and 2020 (during COVID-19). We report the number of viral load (VL) tests, and percent change in VLC and VLS for patients on ART. For 12 countries, 181,192 children had a VL test during the pre-COVID-19 period compared with 177,683 December 2020 during COVID-19. VLC decreased from 68.8% to 68.3% overall. However, 9 countries experienced an increase ranging from a 0.7%-point increase for Tanzania and Zimbabwe to a 15.3%-point increase for Nigeria. VLS increased for all countries from 71.2% to 77.7%. For adolescents the number with a VL test increased from 377,342 to 402,792. VLC decreased from 77.4% to 77.1%. However, 7 countries experienced an increase ranging from 1.8% for Mozambique to 13.8% for Cameroon. VLS increased for all countries from 76.8% to 83.8%. This analysis shows variation in HIV VLC across 12 SSA countries. VLS consistently improved across all countries demonstrating resilience of countries during 2020. Countries should continue to improve clinical outcomes from C/ALHIV despite service disruptions that may occur during pandemic response.

In the early response to the HIV epidemic in Mozambique, paediatric antiretroviral treatment (ART) was principally available in day clinics, located in referral hospitals, with strong linkages between the inpatient wards and outpatient ART clinics. In 2013, the Ministry of Health (MoH) launched an acceleration plan that prioritized decentralization and scale‐up of ART services throughout the country [1]. The results of this effort have been remarkable with the comparison of key indicators from 2013 to 2021 demonstrating the percentage of health facilities offering ART increasing from 39% to 96%, the number of children on ART increasing from 41,400 to 99,169 and the estimated paediatric ART coverage increasing from 41% to 79% [2, 3]. | | To achieve these results, outpatient HIV care at primary health centres became the principal focus of programmatic attention, with an unintended negative impact on the quality of inpatient HIV care for children at referral hospitals. Programmatic data and local operational research demonstrated significant gaps at hospitals along the continuum of paediatric HIV care, including provider‐initiated testing and counselling (PITC), early infant diagnosis (EID) for HIV‐exposed infants, inpatient ART initiation and linkage to care post‐discharge [3, 4, 5, 6].