And because more children are being diagnosed with the disease, doctors are facing more complications than they have so far in the 6-month-old pandemic, experts say.
Jy’Merius Glynn at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta. He was seriously ill with COVID-19, but is doing much better. Contributions
After doctors in emergency room in Rome, Georgia stabilized Hunt’s son, the teenager was transferred to Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta by Scottish Rite. In the intensive care unit, he was placed on a ventilator and underwent dialysis.
“They were the least 15 days of my life,” Hunt said. It is unclear if her son’s epilepsy played a role in making him so ill.
Such severe pediatric cases are extremely rare. Most children who receive COVID-19 do not become critically ill with the disease. Many experience no symptoms at all.
But “what has happened is the strength in numbers,” said Dr. Mark Cameron, a professor at the School of Medicine of Case Western Reserve University. “And I say that in the most ironic ways. What used to be rare and unusual a few months ago is now a clear and present danger.”
Children were largely cocooned at home during the first months of the pandemic, but now go to schools, football fields and swimming pools. And according to experts, it is becoming clear that children can catch and spread the virus more.
Research suggests that 45% of children infected with the coronavirus are asymptomatic, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Childhood symptoms are often mild and cold. Healthy children are more likely to have serious flu complications than COVID-19, according to the CDC.
In Georgia, children represented only about 1.2% of the total hospitalization.
Four children in Georgia have died from complications related to COVID-19: a 7-year-old Savannah boy who had a fever attack in the bathtub and drowned; a 15-year-old boy from Gwinnett County with underlying circumstances; a 14-year-old girl from Habersham County who suffers from a chronic condition; and a 17-year-old boy from Fulton County who suffers from a chronic condition.
Children with underlying medical conditions – including diabetes, chronic lung disease, sickle cell anemia and obesity – have a higher risk of developing COVID-19.
In May, doctors began to see a new and extremely rare complication of the coronavirus infection in children called MIS-C, which stands for Multisystem Inflammatory Syndrome in Children. It manifests about two to four weeks after a coronavirus infection. Experts suspect that children developing this syndrome were exposed to the virus and that their bodies developed an exaggerated immune response.
Symptoms are similar to toxic shock and Kawasaki disease: fever, rash, swollen glands and, in severe cases, heart inflammation.
To date, Atlanta’s Children’s Healthcare has treated about 30 children with the disease.
Dr. Andi Shane, system medical director of infectious diseases at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, said all children “are recovered or recovered.”
Since the beginning of the pandemic, Atlanta’s Children’s Healthcare has seen about 700 patients with the coronavirus, and about a third of them have been hospitalized.
Dr. Stephen Thacker, director of pediatric infectious diseases at Savannah’s Memorial Health University Medical Center, said the number of children there with COVID-19 hospital remains low, but about three at any given time.
He said most pediatric patients stay at Savannah Hospital for a few days to a week, and he has not yet had to intubate children.
“Even though it’s an unusual experience for children to be sick enough to end up in the hospital, I do not want to give the impression that children are somehow immune to complications,” he said.
And while children may whiten COVID-19 just fine, it can be a different story for the adults they come in contact with, especially if they are older and medically vulnerable.
“Now that we are testing more children and mapping transmission, we can see that children are getting infected and can transmit the virus quite easily,” said Cameron from Western University of Case Western.
Jy’Merius Glynn at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta. He was seriously ill with COVID-19, but is doing much better. Contributions
Three of Hunt’s other children tested positive for the disease but never showed symptoms. Hunt, who works as a pharmacy technician, tests negative.
“At first I thought they were exaggerating the numbers,” she said. “I never thought it would hurt us the way it has.”
Hunt cannot wait until the day her son, who is expected to fully recover, is released from the hospital. He looks forward to school, even when lessons are at a distance.
“He will be home,” she said, “just where he needs to be.”
AJC database specialist John Perry has contributed to this article
