COVID is far from over for our kids
“COVID is just mild for kids, right?” (Photo: Pixabay)
The world is currently trying to “live with COVID” (or worse, pretend it doesn’t exist) but as it turns out, the kids aren’t alright. Some adults would say kids are faking it to get a free pass from school, but not when symptoms are this debilitating and unpredictable. In fact, in the US, at least half a million children still struggle with long COVID.
High school student Lincoln Brockmeyer from Cleveland had to give up his freshman season of basketball because of chronic fatigue and pain that made each leg feel like a thousand pounds. He’s also lost weight—almost 30 pounds at one point—and can’t run without getting lightheaded. All this, he got from a bout of COVID last Halloween.
Another case, four-year-old Hunter Reinard, has had long COVID for half his life. After the entire family got COVID early in the pandemic, he suffered from high fevers every few weeks. He couldn’t eat well due to an altered sense of smell and taste, and wasn’t sleeping well either.
Fatigue, pain, difficulty paying attention, and altered taste or smell are common among young long haulers like Lincoln and Hunter. Complaints also range across different parts of the body. For example, a consistent symptom among kids now is stomach pain where there wasn’t any before.
Young, mild, and free?
According to Daniel Griffin, an infectious diseases expert at Columbia University, around 10 to 30% of confirmed adult cases get long COVID. For children, it’s estimated to be at 5 to 10% pediatric cases. This risk could be reduced with vaccination, but that’s something that’s more readily available to anyone 18 and up. At present, children are still less vaccinated than adults.
It’s easy to leave it to the young’s more robust immune systems to protect them from the worst of symptoms. While most children do have mild bouts of COVID, there is no telling what they may experience after.
A preprint study in Norway dating back to June 2021 showed children were more likely to return to the doctor six months post-COVID. A year later, more than 100 kids in Australia were reported to have multisystem inflammatory syndrome after infection. Symptoms like fever, vomiting, abdominal pain, and headaches match those reported at Lincoln and Hunter’s children’s hospital.
Do it for the children
Long COVID remains a mystery to the medical field. While coverage, knowledge, and medical attention on long haulers have been increasing, not the same could be said for children, especially those from countries with less access to quality healthcare.
In the US, roughly 75 to 100 children’s hospitals have set up long COVID clinics. Since Omicron, these hospitals have started seeing more patients come in. A recent Harvard study showed that fewer than 10% of children who contracted COVID-19 earlier in 2020 to 2021 have antibodies that can fight the new strain.
In the Philippines, there are little to no specialty clinics and studies that cover children with long COVID. At a time when testing and monitoring are arguably operating at bare minimum, it’s easy to assume that kids will be kids, and that a little cold will just be a cold, especially when we don’t have a full picture of what’s going on.
This is not to freak out the most pandemic-paranoid parents, though. Rather, it’s a stark reminder of two things: One, that COVID-19 is still not over for our more vulnerable populations. We have to keep taking precautions—from mask wearing to monitoring symptoms and getting tested, if we can—mostly for their sake. Two, to get your kids vaccinated, and yourself boosted, ASAP. With vaccines almost good to go for kids under five in the US, it’s only a matter of time before the rest of the world would follow.
