I know some feel these types of articles are making people "panic," but here are some young patients and their parents describing the COVID-related infections that are sending them to the ICU ...
https://www.miamiherald.com/news/coronavirus/article242728091.html?A 14-year-old in Portland, Oregon, had to be rushed to the hospital with heart failure. A baby in California’s Bay Area started developing big rashes on her hands, along with swelling legs and red eyes. An 8-year-old boy in New York City became so weak he couldn’t breathe.
Multiple reports from around the country describe what is happening to children who develop what doctors are calling a coronavirus-related syndrome that looks similar to Kawasaki disease. The syndrome was first reported in London, but doctors in New York soon started seeing cases of the rare inflammatory disease there, too.
Researchers studying the province of Bergamo, Italy — hit hard by the pandemic — reported they found a 30-fold increase in children with Kawasaki-like symptoms.
The researchers compared data from two months of the outbreak in Italy from February to April and the five years before the coronavirus emerged, according to the article published in The Lancet medical journal Wednesday.
More than 100 children in New York state have developed the rare syndrome and three have died, according to The New York Times.
Cases have been reported around the country as well. A hospital in Detroit, another coronavirus hot spot, has treated more than 20 kids for the symptoms, according to the Detroit Free Press.
Dr. Jeffrey Burns, a doctor at Boston Children’s Hospital, said he is helping coordinate doctors around the world to discuss the new condition and compare notes, according to CNN.
“This multisystem inflammatory syndrome is not directly caused by the virus,” he said on CNN. “The leading hypothesis is that it is due to the immune response of the patient.”
The 8th grade girl in Portland, named Leah, had already not been feeling well when her condition got much worse, she told ABC News.
“I told my mom I needed to go to the hospital, that I wasn’t feeling well and that I needed her to take me because it was like — it was a weird pain that I was having,” she told ABC. The broadcaster said it withheld the 14-year-old’s last name to protect her privacy.
She had a fever. Her eyes were bloodshot and red. Leah’s doctor in Portland had already heard of the strange symptoms some kids were developing during the pandemic, so he had paramedics take her straight to the emergency room, according ABC News.
Her doctor called Leah’s case a “textbook” example of the new COVID-related symptoms that are appearing in this new syndrome, ABC News reports.
A 6-month-old baby in Santa Clara County developed the symptoms in March, when doctors still did not know what was going on with these complications in children, according to ABC7 News.
The baby’s mom, identified as Mahera, said, “The rashes were also getting very big and her hands and legs started kind of swelling. Her eyes were getting red,” according to the station.
She took her baby, named Zara, to the Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital Stanford where the girl tested positive for the coronavirus, ABC7 reported.
Dr. Yvonne Maldonado, who treated Zara, told the television station, “It was a very interesting case, because I mentioned it to my colleagues around the country back when it happened, and I said are any of you seeing this? And they said no, not at all.”
“The main thing that we worry about with Kawasaki is that there can be longer term complications... And those include inflammation of the arteries, especially those around the heart,” Maldonado said, ABC7 reports.
Eight-year-old Jayden, from Queens, New York, started having a fever and diarrhea in late April, likely from the coronavirus, according to The New York Post. But his condition deteriorated.
On April 29, Jayden called to his mother as he lost the strength to breathe, according to the newspaper. The boy started to turn blue and his 15-year-old brother began to give him CPR, a skill he picked up in Boy Scouts, The Post reported.
Jayden had started to go into cardiac arrest, the boy’s father told CNN on Wednesday. Roup Hardowar said his younger son was in the hospital for two weeks recovering.
Doctors told the parents that their son suffered from the condition linked to the coronavirus. Jayden tested negative for the virus, but did have the antibodies for COVID-19, indicating an earlier infection, CNN reports.
