Children’s hospitals across the country say they are still seeing a wave of children suffering from a serious illness that usually follows coronavirus infections.
The big picture: Serious coronavirus infections in children remain extremely rare compared to the risk in adults. But persistent side effects from those infections mean that children’s hospitalizations don’t exactly match adults’.
Even as hospital admissions for the coronavirus general decline, children’s hospitals say they still see large numbers of children suffering from multi-system inflammatory syndrome, commonly known as MIS-C, a serious illness that usually occurs several 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 1 and 14 years old, and the condition disproportionately affects children of color, according to the CDC.
- “As the population seems to have less active cases overall, we see more children being admitted with COVID-related problems, but most of them – I would say more than half in the past five weeks – are children with MIS- C, ”said Rob McGregor, chief medical officer at Akron Children’s Hospital
What they say: Hospitals say the disease is more common now than before during the pandemic, and children are now sicker than at previous peaks.
- “The MIS-C really hit us this time, and last month was much higher numbers and higher sharpness than us [had] previously with MIS-C – which is hard to explain, ”said Lara Shekerdemian, chief of critical care at Texas Children’s Hospital.
- Unlike other children’s hospitals interviewed by Axios, Texas Children’s has also seen more severe cases of acute COVID. “It feels like … we have seen patients in the past two months who are sicker when they get COVID than at the beginning,” added Shekerdemian.
In numbers: Pediatric COVID-related hospital admissions are up 50% between Oct. 1 and Jan. 7, according to an analysis of data from Health and Human Services by the University of Minnesota COVID-19 Hospitalization Tracking Project.
- The number of hospital admissions in adults increased by almost 300% over the same period.
- The number of hospital admissions for adults has since decreased by 54%, while the number of hospital admissions for children has decreased by 25%.
- As the number of cases started to increase in late November and December, “based on our experience, we said OK, MIS-C Task Force, watch your agendas,” said Roberta DeBiasi, chief of the teething ward at Children’s National Hospital in Washington, DC That wave started in January and continues today.
- The CDC only has complete information on the number of MIS-C cases, specifically up to mid-December, when they increased.
What we look at: The children’s hospitals said that, based on past trends, they expect hospital admissions to decline in the coming weeks, a delayed result of the lower prevalence of the coronavirus in the community.
- “It seems that the peaks we had in the children’s hospital lagged a little bit behind the peaks we saw in the adult systems,” said Ronald Ford, chief medical officer at Joe DiMaggio Children’s Hospital. “I would expect peds recordings to start to decline. The big unknown here to 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 there is a “clear possibility” that they are linked to more serious cases of MIS-C.
- “We don’t know, but that’s one of those things that needs to be studied and explored, as different variants have different degrees of severity of MIS-C in children,” he added.