At least five U.S. hospitals have started long-term pediatric clinics to help children with persistence Covid-19 disease as the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention set up a massive nationwide long-term COVID study that includes children.
While many children do not suffer from severe COVID-19 disease, coronavirus can have a lasting and serious impact on your health.
At the request of CBS News, an Omaha hospital documented how it is trying to help a girl struggling with the persistent effects of the virus.
Twelve-year-old Piper Sibert has been battling extreme fatigue for the past two months. He has gone to the children’s hospital and Omaha Medical Center to regain his resistance.
These days, when she gets to run, she’s in rehab, to encourage the medical staff to cheer her on.
“It’s scary because you don’t know if you’re going to do something that might stop you from breathing,” Piper told David Begnaud of CBS News. “It’s kind of a tightening. It almost feels like someone is sitting on their chest.”
Piper’s mother, Sarah, said her husband tested positive for the virus in November, but no one else in the family got sick. Then, one day in February, Piper was sent home from school.
“He had just gone from a very active child to a very lethargic one, he was wearing out,” Sarah Sibert said. “We did an antibody test and that showed Piper had COVID at some point, but we don’t know exactly when it was.”
Dr. Jean Ballweg, who runs the clinic for long-term pediatric carriers, said these young patients do not show the signs they expected. The clinic treats about ten patients like Piper every Friday.
“I think most of us would have expected the really symptomatic children with acute COVID to be the ones who had symptoms for months, and that’s not what we see,” he said.
And patients like Piper have a long way to go in recovery.
“I’m frustrated that there’s no cure and I can make it go away,” Piper said. “I can’t do the things I like and I like to do.”
Long-term COVID is also different from another pediatric condition associated with the virus, Multisystem inflammatory syndrome of children. The latter disease is associated with high fever, rashes, and stomach pain.
Nearly one in five cases of COVID-19 during the last week of March were in children under 18 years of age.
Health experts say the coronavirus variant that was first discovered in England is increasing coronavirus cases in several states.
The director of the National Institutes of Health said it is likely to be 70% more infectious and significantly more deadly, even for young people.
However, Dr. Ashish Jha, dean of Brown University School of Public Health, offered some optimism in an appearance on “CBS This Morning” on Monday.
“These vaccines They’re really remarkable, “Jha said.” They seem to hold up very well all variants, against the UK variant which is very widespread, it is fantastic. Even against some of the more complicated variants, it seems to be largely maintained. “