Children’s hospitals across the country say they are still seeing an increase in the number of children suffering from a serious illness that usually occurs after coronavirus infections.
The big picture: Serious coronavirus infections in children remain extremely rare, compared to risk in adults. But the persistent side effects of these infections mean that children’s hospitalization rates don’t exactly reflect those of adults.
Even as hospitalizations for coronavirus general decline, children’s hospitals say they are still seeing a large number of children suffering from multisystem 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 of age, 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 admitted children 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, medical director of Akron Children’s Hospital.
What they are saying: Hospitals say the disease appears to be more common now than before in the pandemic, and children are more sick now than in previous outbreaks.
- “MIS-C really hit us this time, and last month there were much higher numbers and greater acuity than us [had] before with MIS-C – and that’s hard to explain, “said Lara Shekerdemian, chief of intensive care at Texas Children’s Hospital.
- Unlike other children’s hospitals interviewed by Axios, Texas Children’s also saw more severe cases of acute COVID. “It looks like … we’ve seen patients in the past two months who are sicker when they have COVID than in the initial experience,” added Shekerdemian.
By the numbers: COVID-related pediatric hospitalizations increased by 50% between October 1 and January 7, according to a Health and Human Services data analysis from the University of Minnesota COVID-19 Hospitalization Tracking Project.
- Adult hospitalizations increased by almost 300% in the same period.
- Adult hospitalizations have fallen by 54% since then, while children’s hospitalizations have decreased by 25%.
- As cases began to increase in late November and December, “based on our experience, we said OK, MIS-C task force, mark your calendars,” he said Roberta DeBiasi, head of the Pediatric Diseases Division at Children’s National Hospital in Washington, DC. This increase started in January and continues today.
- The CDC only has complete information on the number of MIS-C cases specifically until mid-December, when they were increasing.
What we’re watching: Children’s hospitals said that, based on previous trends, they expect the number of hospitalizations to decrease in the coming weeks, a late result of the lower prevalence of coronavirus in the community.
- “It looks like the peaks we had at the children’s hospital were slightly behind those we saw in adult systems,” said Ronald Ford, medical director at Children’s Hospital Joe DiMaggio. “I would expect peds’ admissions to start dropping. Now, the big question here for everyone is how these new variants are going to affect things.”
- He said it is still unclear how the new variants of the virus affect children, and that it is a “distinct possibility” that may be related to more serious cases of MIS-C.
- “We don’t know, but this is one of those things that will have to be studied and examined, if different variants have a different severity rate of MIS-C in children,” he added.