More children stricken with COVID-19 inflammatory reaction, 29 in California
An increasing number of children are being infected with COVID-19 and more than 200 of them, including 29 patients in California, are suffering 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 glimpse into how the coronavirus is impacting people under age 18.
The studies said that although most cases involving young people are mild, there is a significant and growing number of children who suffer from a serious ailment known as multi-system inflammatory syndrome, or MIS-C, which can cause severe abdominal pain, vomiting, rashes, fevers, heart trouble and diarrhea.
The mysterious ailment 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 hospitalized, 10 died.
One in three of the hospitalized children ended up in the intensive care unit, according to the CDC studies. The children, whose median age was 8, stayed an average of six days in the ICU.
As with adults, more than 55% of the child 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 did not have any 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 adults — 8 of every 100,000 children compared to 164.5 for every 100,000 adults — the weekly rate of pediatric hospital admissions increased steadily between March 21 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 released a statement Thursday that said 29 cases of MIS-C have been reported statewide, but that “to protect patient confidentiality in counties with fewer than 11 cases, we are not providing total counts at this time.”
The other states where the CDC studied children 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 at UCSF’s Benioff Children’s Hospital have been conducting intensive studies of how the coronavirus impacts children. Doctors there have recently seen dozens of children with reddish-purple lesions on the feet and hands known as acral perniosis. The rashes all appeared weeks or months after exposure to adult relatives with flu-like symptoms, leading researchers to believe the symptoms were a reaction to COVID-19.
The problem is none of the young patients tested positive for or had antibodies to the disease, and most of the adult relatives were never tested.
Strange clusters of patients with perniosis-like lesions have also been reported around the world, with at least 80 cases in Chicago, New York, Boston and other places on the East Coast. The condition has also been found in Europe. It has, in fact, been referred to as “COVID toes” since the first cases were reported on an online pediatric dermatology forum in Italy.
Peter Fimrite is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: [email protected]. Twitter: @pfimrite
