Doctors Warn Of More Possible Cases of Strange Coronavirus Syndrome in Kids

By Staff, CNN

Parents, hospitals and clinics should expect to see more cases of a mystifying condition that seems to be affecting children after a bout with Covid-19, doctors warned Wednesday.

The condition, called multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children, appears to be a post-viral syndrome, said Dr. Jeffrey Burns, a critical care specialist at Boston Children's Hospital who has been coordinating a global group of doctors who compare notes on the condition.

Doctors are investigating cases in at least 150 children, most of them in New York. According to a CNN survey, hospitals and clinics in at least 17 states and Washington, DC are checking into suspected cases.

"This multisystem inflammatory syndrome is not directly caused by the virus," Burns told CNN. "The leading hypothesis is that it is due to the immune response of the patient."

Symptoms include persistent fever, inflammation and poor function in organs such as the kidneys or heart. Children may also show evidence of blood vessel inflammation, such as red eyes, a bright red tongue and cracked lips, said Dr. Moshe Arditi, a pediatric infectious diseases expert at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles.

Dr. Ngozi Ezike, director of the Illinois Department of Public Health, said it's a complicated disorder.

"It's a spectrum of disorders, and so in some cases you'll have the individual have coronary artery involvement. Sometimes they don't," Ezike told a news conference.

Not all of the affected children have tested positive for the coronavirus, but reports from Europe and from several cities in the United States show a link.

"There seems to be delayed responses to Covid infections in these kids," Arditi said.

Burns believes more cases will turn up as Covid-19 affects more people. It's a rare condition, but rare consequences of viral infections are seen more often when millions of people are infected.

"We can expect that each of the epicenters will see clusters of these emerging roughly four to six weeks later," Burns added.

Most children are not seriously affected by the syndrome, Burns said. Most don't even need treatment in the intensive care unit, he said, although a very few have died. "We do have proven treatments that we can use and are using," he said. They include blood thinners and immune modulators.

Relatively, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is preparing a Health Alert Network notification to send to doctors across the country, a CDC spokesman said. Burns said the World Health Organization is also working to define the syndrome and alert doctors so they will know what to look for and how to treat it.