Dr. Lawrence Kleinman, a co-author of the study and a leading pediatric researcher at Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, said the public needs to understand that COVID-19 seriously affects children, too.
“We can’t say that kids are spared,” Kleinman told NJ Advance Media on Tuesday. “The relative frequency of the disease initially seemed to be in adults. Now, we see it’s more common than we thought in children, and it will be over time that we know how common it is in children. There are still unknowns that we’re working through.”
Researchers followed 48 pediatric patients — from newborns to young adults, up to 21 years old — who were admitted prior to April 3 to 40 pediatric intensive care units across the country and in Canada.
More than 20% experienced failure of two or more organ systems due to COVID-19, and nearly 40% required a breathing tube and ventilator. At the end of the follow-up period, nearly 33% of the children were still hospitalized, with three requiring ventilator support and one on life support.
Two of the children admitted during the three-week study period died.
“What we found was that though the numbers were modest, there were still children who got very sick from this illness,” Kleinman said. “Nearly 1 of 5 children in the pediatric ICU did not have an underlying condition.”
Kleinman said the underlying conditions involved ranged from obesity to lung disease. About 2 in 5 patients had “multi-organ system medical complexity,” and others suffered from cancer, diabetes or sickle cell anemia.
In New Jersey, only 2% of the state’s 50,360 hospitalizations as of Monday involved kids younger than 18, according to Dr. Edward Lifshitz, the state’s communicable disease chief.
But on Saturday, health officials and Gov. Phil Murphy announced the state’s first death of a pediatric patient, a 4-year-old with an underlying condition. While officials did not disclose the condition, they confirmed it was not the Kawasaki-like inflammatory disease that has sickened at least 12 New Jersey children since March.
Those kids were treated in four hospitals for the multi-system inflammatory syndrome, which has added another threat to pediatric patients during the pandemic.
A study similar to the one published Monday is expected to be released in the next two weeks, tracking data for children hospitalized with the inflammatory syndrome, according to Kleinman.
“There, the anecdotal reports indicate that many of them do not have underlying medical conditions,” he said.
Kleinman said the initial goal of his work was to provide an initial snapshot of the pandemic in North America.
“We’re watching as our understanding of this disease evolves,” he said. “One of the things that all of this suggests to me is that delaying or deferring decisions by policymakers is a sign of strength and understanding that we’ll know more in a week than we know this week.”
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Patrick Lanni may be reached at [email protected].
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