Children’s hospitals across the country say they are still experiencing a surge of children suffering from a serious illness that usually follows coronavirus infections.
The whole picture: Severe coronavirus infections in children remain extremely rare, compared to the risk for adults. But persistent side effects from these infections mean that the hospitalization of children does not exactly reflect adults.
Even as hospitalizations for coronavirus generally declining, children’s hospitals say they still see a large number of children suffering from multisystem inflammation syndrome, commonly known as MIS-C, a serious disease that is usually infected with the coronavirus a few weeks after a child.
- MIS-C can cause inflammation in various parts of the body, and symptoms include fever, abdominal pain, vomiting and diarrhea. Most cases occur in children between 1 and 14 years of age, and the condition affects children of color disproportionate according to the CDC.
- “As the population generally seems to have less active cases, we see more children being admitted with COVID-related problems, but most of them – I would say more than half in the last five weeks – are children with MIS – C, ‘said Rob McGregor, Chief Medical Officer at Akron Children’s Hospital.
What they say: According to hospitals, the disease now appears to be more common than earlier in the pandemic, and children are now sicker than in earlier seizures.
- “The MIS-C really hit us this time, and last month the numbers and the sharpness were higher than us [had] previously with MIS-C – and that’s hard to explain, “said Lara Shekerdemian, head of critical care at Texas Children’s Hospital.
- Unlike other pediatric hospitals interviewed by Axios, Texas Children’s has also seen severe cases of acute COVID. “It feels like … over the past two to three months we’ve seen patients who are sicker when they ‘have been present with COVID than we’ve experienced before,” Shekerdemian added.
By the numbers: Pediatric COVID-related hospitalizations increased by 50% between October 1 and January 7, according to an analysis of health and human services by the University of Minnesota’s COVID-19 detection project.
- Adult hospitalizations increased by almost 300% in the same period.
- Adult hospitalizations have since fallen by 54%, while pediatric hospitalizations have declined by 25%.
- When business started to increase at the end of November and December, “we said in our experience OK, MIS-C task force, mark your calendars,” said Roberta DeBiasi, Head of the Pediatric Diseases Division at Children’s Hospital in Washington, DC. The boom began in January and continues today.
- The CDC only has complete information on the number of MIS-C cases specifically up to mid-December when it was on the rise.
What we are looking at: The children’s hospitals said that, based on previous trends, they expect the number of hospitalizations to decrease in the coming weeks, a delayed consequence of the lower incidence of coronavirus.
- “The peaks in the orphanage seem to have lagged a bit behind those we’ve seen in adult systems,” said Ronald Ford, chief medical officer at Joe DiMaggio Orphanage. “I would expect the admissions of peds to start falling. The biggest unknown here for everyone is how these new variants are going to affect things.”
- He said it was still unclear how the new virus variants would affect children, and that there was a ‘clear possibility’ that it could be linked to severe cases of MIS-C.
- “We do not know, but it is one of the things that needs to be studied and investigated if different variants of MIS-C differ in children,” he added.