As concerns mount over children with a serious and potentially deadly inflammatory condition, a new study sheds light on the illness’s distinctive characteristics and provides the strongest evidence yet that the syndrome is linked to the coronavirus.
The condition, called pediatric multisystem inflammatory syndrome, has been reported in about 100 children in New York state, including three who died, governor Andrew M. Cuomo said this week. Cases have been reported in other states, including Louisiana, Mississippi and California.
There have also been at least 50 cases reported in European countries, including in France, Switzerland, Spain and Britain.
In the new study, published on Wednesday in the journal Lancet, doctors in Italy compared a series of 10 cases of the illness with cases of a similar rare condition in children called Kawasaki disease.
The authors found that over the five years before the coronavirus pandemic — January 2015 to mid-February 2020 — 19 children with Kawasaki disease were treated at the Papa Giovanni XXIII Hospital, which has an advanced pediatric department, in the Bergamo province.
But during the two months from February 18 to April 20 alone, the hospital, which is at the epicentre of Italy’s coronavirus outbreak, treated 10 children with similar hyper-inflammatory symptoms.
Ten cases in two months — about 30 times the rate of the Kawasaki disease cases, which occurred at a pace of about one every three months — suggests a cluster that is driven by the coronavirus pandemic. New York Times News Service