Children may suffer from lingering effects of the novel coronavirus for months after infection, The New York Times reports.
Doctors said there are still a lot of unknowns when it comes to children and the novel coronavirus. In general, research shows that children represent less cases of COVID-19. But, because there’s so few cases, experts can’t identify long-term symptoms.
- “With schools reopening, we’re likely to see more infections in children,” Dr. Richard Besser, a pediatrician and chief executive of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, told The New York Times. “We need to make sure we’re doing the studies to understand the short, medium and long-term effects.”
An example:
Consider Maggie Flannery, of Manhattan, New York, who fell ill with COVID-19. She suffered joint pain and fatigue after she started to get better. Her parents recovered, but she had lingering symptoms.
- “It felt like an elephant sitting on my chest,” Maggie told The New York Times. “It was hard to take a deep breath, I was nauseous all the time, I didn’t want to eat, I was very light-headed when I stood up or even just lying down.”
- She likely had long COVID-19, which is when you have symptoms months after you’re first sick with the virus. Back then, doctors did’t know much about long-haulers and the coronavirus lasting for months.
What happened before
At the beginning of the pandemic, there were a lot of questions about how COVID-19 can impact children. A rare child syndrome in children — called Kawasaki disease — was linked to the coronavirus, as I wrote about for Deseret News. Similarly, children were diagnosed with MIS-C because of the virus.
In March, a study published in popular medical journal Pediatrics found babies and preschool-aged children can be at high risk for developing symptoms, too, as I wrote for Deseret News.