Three young children have died in New York of a mysterious inflammation syndrome with links to COVID-19, says Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo on Saturday.
“The illness has taken the lives of three young New Yorkers,” Mr. Cuomo said during his daily briefing in Manhattan. “This is new. This is developing.”
With coronavirus pandemic wrecking New York from the last two months, people found relief with the fact that inceptive reports perceived that children were largely unaffected from the Covid-19. However, that too has crumbled down with the new disease claiming three young lives. “We were laboring under the impression young people were not affected by Covid-19……We are not sure that that is the fact anymore.” Cuomo told reporters.
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The illness has been called “Pediatric Multi-System Inflammatory Syndrome Associated with COVID-19,” and Cuomo said the state will launch an investigation into it in conjunction with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. When the Health Department was asked to account for any cases fastened with the new illness, 15 cases involving children aged 2 to 15 who had been in ICU since April 17 were detected.
The syndrome is a toxic shock-like inflammation affecting the skin, eyes, blood vessels, and the heart leaving children severely ill, some requiring mechanical ventilation. The symptoms bear correspondence with Kawasaki disease. Furthermore, the patients did not show any symptoms of respiratory disease however when tested for the virus or its antibodies, they were all positive. So the newfangled virus has the matching antibodies as coronavirus but shows relatively different symptoms when juxtaposed.
State Health Authorities said prior to this week there have been 73 reported cases in New York of children falling severely ill with a toxic-shock like a syndrome. According to the New York Times, some cases have been reported in Louisiana, Mississippi, and California with 50 cases being reported in Britain, France, Switzerland, Spain, and Italy. A 14-year-old boy in the UK also died of the new illness; several cases in Europe were detailed in a report published in the Lancet. Experts there reported that abdominal pain, gastrointestinal symptoms, and cardiac inflammation were common to the cases.
Although the illness is unascertained and most of the information about it is in a haze, experts say children are at a higher risk. Doctors are also carrying out genetic tests to find whether the illness is genetic as one child falls sick while the whole family seems unscarred.
(Source- New York Times , USA Today and Lancet)
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