An increasing number of children are infected with COVID-19 and more than 200 of them, including 29 patients in California, suffer from severe inflammatory reactions that can be life-threatening, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported Friday.
Two reports released by the CDC provided a troubling look at how the coronavirus affects people under 18 years of age.
The studies said that although most cases in which younger people are milieu, there is a significant and growing number of children suffering from a serious disease, known as multi-system inflammatory syndrome, or MIS-C, who suffer from abdominal pain, vomiting, rash, fever, heart problems and diarrhea.
The mysterious disease was found in 203 of 570 children diagnosed with COVID-19 who were studied between March 2 and July 18. Of the 364 young COVID-19 patients admitted to the hospital, 10 died.
One in three of the hospital children ended up in the intensive care unit, according to the CDC surveys. The children, whose median age was 8, remained in the ICU for an average of six days.
As in adults, more than 55% of pediatric patients were male and 40.5% were Latino, the highest percentage of any racial or ethnic category. The most common underlying condition was obesity, but two-thirds of the children had no pre-existing conditions, according to the reports.
The analysis of patients in California and 13 other states found that although the cumulative rate of hospitalization is lower than that of adults – 8 out of every 100,000 children compared to 164.5 per 100,000 adults – the weekly rate of admission to pediatric hospitals increased slowly between 21 March and July 25
It is not known how many children in the Bay Area have been diagnosed with multi-system inflammatory syndrome. The California Department of Public Health on Thursday issued a statement saying that 29 cases of MIS-C have been reported statewide, but that “to protect patient confidentiality in counties with less than 11 cases, we do not currently provide total counts.”
The other states where the CDC children studied with MIS-C and COVID-19 were Connecticut, Colorado, Georgia, Iowa, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, New Mexico, New York, Ohio, Oregon, Tennessee, and Utah.
Meanwhile, researchers from UCSF’s Benioff Children’s Hospital have conducted intensive research on how the coronavirus affects children. Doctors there have recently seen dozens of children with red-purple lesions on their feet and hands, known as acral perniosis. The rash appeared every few weeks or months after exposure to adult siblings with flu-like symptoms, leading researchers to believe that the symptoms were a reaction to COVID-19.
The problem is not one of the young patients who tested positive for or had antibodies to the disease, and most of the adult siblings were never tested.
Early clusters of patients with perniosis-like injuries have also been reported around the world, with at least 80 cases in Chicago, New York, Boston and elsewhere on the East Coast. The condition has also been found in Europe. It has actually been referred to as “COVID toe” since the first cases were reported on an online pediatric dermatology forum in Italy.
Peter Fimrite is a staff writer for the San Francisco Chronicle. Email: [email protected]. Twitter: @pfimrite
