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Children’s hospitals across the country say they are still seeing a surge of children with severe illness that usually follows coronavirus infections.
The big picture: Severe coronavirus infections in children remain extremely rare, compared to the risk in adults. But the lingering side effects of these infections mean that children’s hospitalization rates don’t accurately reflect adults.
Even as coronavirus hospitalizations Overall decline, children’s hospitals say they are still seeing large numbers of children with multisystem inflammatory syndrome, commonly known as MIS-C, a serious illness that typically occurs weeks after a child is infected with the coronavirus.
- 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 the ages of 1 and 14, and the condition disproportionately affects children of color, according to the CDC.
- “As the general population appears to have fewer active cases, we are seeing more children admitted with COVID-related issues, but most of these – I would say more than half over the past five weeks – are children who have a GIS. C “, said Rob McGregor, Chief Medical Officer of Akron Children’s Hospital.
What they say: Hospitals say the disease appears to be more common today than it was when the pandemic began, and children are sicker today than they were in previous outbreaks.
- “The MIS-C really hit us this time around, and the last month was much higher and sharper than us [had] previously with MIS-C – and it’s hard to explain, ”said Lara Shekerdemian, head of intensive care at Texas Children’s Hospital.
- Unlike other children’s hospitals surveyed by Axios, Texas Children’s has also seen more severe cases of acute COVID. “It feels like … we have seen in the last two or three months patients who are sicker when they present with COVID than we did at the start,” Shekerdemian added.
In numbers: COVID-related pediatric hospitalizations increased by 50% between Oct. 1 and Jan. 7, according to an analysis of health and social services data by the University of Minnesota’s COVID-19 Hospitalization Tracking Project.
- Adult hospitalizations have increased by almost 300% over the same period.
- Adult hospitalizations have since declined by 54%, while child hospitalizations have decreased by 25%.
- As cases started to increase in late November and December, “based on our experience, we said OK, MIS-C task force, mark your calendars,” said Roberta DeBiasi, head of the pediatric disease division at Children’s National Hospital in Washington, DC. This surge began in January and continues today.
- The CDC only has complete information on the number of MIS-C cases until mid-December, when they were on the rise.
What we are looking at: Children’s hospitals said that, based on previous trends, they expected the number of hospitalizations to decline in the coming weeks, a delayed consequence of the low community prevalence of the coronavirus.
- “It seemed like the peaks we had at the Children’s Hospital were a bit behind the peaks we were seeing in the adult systems,” said Ronald Ford, Chief Medical Officer at Joe DiMaggio Children’s Hospital. . “I would expect peds admissions to start going down. Now the big unknown here for everyone is how these new variants are going to affect things.”
- He said it is still unclear how the new virus variants affect children, and that it is “possible” that they could be linked to more severe cases of MIS-C.
- “We don’t know, but it’s one of those things that will need to be investigated and investigated, whether different variants have different severity rates of MIS-C in children,” he added.
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