Update
Children Are Falling Ill With a Baffling Ailment Related to Covid-19
No children are known to have died so far, but several have ended up in intensive care with mysterious symptoms that include enlarged coronary arteries.
Sixty-four children in New York State have been hospitalized with
a mysterious illness that doctors do not yet fully understand but that may be linked to Covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, officials said on Wednesday.
In an
advisory to health care providers, state health officials said that most of the children who were believed to have what has been labeled “pediatric multisystem inflammatory syndrome” had tested positive for the virus or for antibodies to it.
The new tally from state officials came two days after
New York City health officials said that 15 children in the city had been hospitalized with the syndrome and that many of them had been infected with the virus.
One child, 8 years old, arrived at a Long Island hospital near death last week. His brother, a boy scout, had begun performing chest compressions before the ambulance crew reached their home.
In the past two days alone, the hospital, Cohen Children’s Medical Center, has admitted five critically ill patients — ages 4 to 12 — with an unusual sickness that appears to be somehow linked to Covid-19, the disease caused by coronavirus. In total, about 25 similarly ill children have been admitted there in recent weeks with
symptoms ranging from reddened tongues to enlarged coronary arteries.
Doctors say this condition does not seem to be driven by the virus attacking the lungs, a hallmark of coronavirus infection in adults.
While some of the children with this condition do end up with respiratory problems and a few have needed to be on ventilators, “it seems to be less a lung-specific disease,” said Dr. Steven Kernie, chief of pediatric critical care medicine at Columbia University and NewYork-Presbyterian Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital, which has treated between 10 and 20 children with the condition, ranging from infants to older teenagers.
Since the coronavirus pandemic began, most infected children have not developed serious respiratory failure of the kind that has afflicted adults. But in recent weeks,
a mysterious new syndrome has cropped up among children on Long Island, in New York City and in other hot spots around the country, in an indication that the risk to children may be greater than anticipated.
No solid data yet exists about how many children in the United States have fallen ill with what doctors are calling “
pediatric multisystem inflammatory syndrome.”
“This is really only a disease that has been clear for two weeks now, so there is so much we’re trying to learn about this,” the chief of pediatric critical care at Cohen Children’s, Dr. James Schneider, said in an interview on Tuesday.
He said many of their symptoms — from rashes to redness of eyes to blood circulation problems — appear to be rooted in an “overall inflammatory response.”
In some patients the syndrome seems similar to a rare childhood illness called Kawasaki disease, which can lead to inflammation of the blood vessels, especially the coronary arteries.
The symptoms of Kawasaki disease often start with a fever and a rash, but when undiagnosed and untreated, the illness can lead to serious heart conditions, such as coronary aneurysms. The disease, which generally afflicts patients 6 months to about 6 years old, is considered rare in the United States.
But Dr. Kernie said it was important to distinguish between this coronavirus-related condition and Kawasaki disease.
On Monday night, the New York City Health Department
issued a bulletin, asking doctors to report any cases of the syndrome. The bulletin said the health authorities in the city knew of 15 such cases, involving patients age 2 to 15, who have been in intensive care units since April 17.
Children Are Falling Ill With a Baffling Ailment Related to Covid-19
https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/doh/dow...iatric-multi-system-inflammatory-syndrome.pdf
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