By Joshua Huff, sports editor
Health departments throughout the country are beginning to raise concerns regarding a mysterious serious inflammatory syndrome found in children that could potentially be associated with COVID-19.
Recently reported by authorities in the United Kingdom, the New York City Health Department issued an alert on May 4, 2020, after children, ranging from infants to teenagers, were found to have cases compatible with multi-system inflammatory syndrome within city hospitals. Since then, cases have begun to materialize in states in the Midwest and in the South, the Boston Children’s Hospital reported.
This follows a New York Times report that at least 25 children or more in New York City have developed multi-system inflammatory complications possibly related to COVID-19. Those numbers emerged following a surge in the virus, which suggests “it’s a post-infectious immune response,” one pediatrician said. Most cases tested positive either for SARS-CoV-2 or for antibodies to the virus.
Though some of the children who have been diagnosed with the multi-system inflammatory illness have been admitted to intensive care, where they’ve received cardiac or respiratory support, the New York Times reported that many children are responding well to treatment and that none have died.
Doctors note that though there is growing evidence that some healthy children are falling ill with this new mysterious syndrome, they are still at far less risk from COVID-19 than adults.
The syndrome, which is now being called “Pediatric Multi-System Inflammatory Syndrome Potentially Associated with COVID-19,” is characterized by persistent fever with features of Kawasaki disease and/or toxic shock syndrome, with some children experiencing gastrointestinal symptoms and cardiac inflammation.
On May 2, the International PICU-COVID-19 Collaboration, coordinated by Jeffrey Burns, MD, MPH, chief of Critical Care Medicine at Boston Children’s Hospital, convened a Zoom conference with pediatric experts throughout the world. Panelists mentioned that some children diagnosed were found to have some or all features seen in Kawasaki disease. Those symptoms included fever, rash, conjunctivitis; red, swollen hands; and red, cracked lips. Children also had clinical and laboratory signs of cytokine storm syndrome, an exaggerated systemic immune response that has caused organ damage in adults with COVID-19.
The information available for this syndrome remains limited due to the small number of reported cases compared to the number of COVID-19 cases.
“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, told the New York Times.