Doctors Warn About Strange Condition Among Kids Who Had Coronavirus

• Symptoms of multisystem inflammatory syndrome include inflammation, persistent fever, and poor function of the organs such as the heart and kidney.
• Doctors expect that more cases of the condition will happen as coronavirus spreads to more people.

A strange condition is afflicting some children who had a bout with COVID-19, according to doctors. Called the multisystem inflammatory syndrome, it showed up in at least 150 children in the United States.

Dr. Jeffrey Burns, a critical care specialist at Boston Children’s Hospital, clarified that the condition is not directly caused by the coronavirus and that their “leading hypothesis is that it is due to the immune response of the patient.”

Some symptoms of the multisystem inflammatory syndrome are inflammation, persistent fever, plus poor function of heart and kidney.

The affected children may also exhibit signs of blood vessel inflammation, such as cracked lips, bright red tongue, and red eyes.

It was the doctors in Britain who first alerted the medical world about the condition last month. According to the Royal College of Paediatrics, between 75 and 100 kids in Britain have the condition. Doctors in Italy have also reported several cases.

9-year-old Bobby Dean was admitted to a hospital bed in Rochester, N.Y after showing symptoms of severe dehydration, abdominal pain, and a racing heart.

It’s a complicated disorder, said Dr. Ngozi Ezike, director of the Illinois Department of Public Health.

“It’s a spectrum of disorders, and so in some cases you’ll have the individual have coronary artery involvement. Sometimes they don’t,” he said.

Not all of the affected kids have tested positive for COVID-19, but reports from Europe and several cities in the U.S. have established a link.

Dr. Moshe Arditi, professor of Pediatrics and director of the Pediatric Infectious Diseases Division at Cedars-Sinai, said that there seems to be delayed responses in coronavirus infections in the kids affected.

These doctors expect that more cases of the condition will be reported as the coronavirus spreads to more people. Rare conditions such as this have been known to turn up as rare consequences of viral infections.

“It makes sense that it emerged in New York first because New York had the largest and most severe outbreak (of Covid-19), followed by New Jersey and, unfortunately, Boston,” Burns added.

Very few children have died because of the syndrome and most are not fatally affected, with majority not even needing intensive care treatment.

Alany, a 3-year old from Bronx, New York, recovered from multi-system inflammatory syndrome linked to COVID-19.

Arditi said that the new entity “has some similarities to Kawasaki disease.”

“But there are a lot more features that are consistent with toxic shock syndrome, such as multi-organ system involvement and severe abdominal involvement with diarrhea.”

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is preparing to send alerts to doctors across the country. According to Burns, studying this is very important especially because it can help explain why children are not as affected by the coronavirus than adults are.