We Need More Information from China, and Quickly

We Need More Information from China, and Quickly

https://www.nationalreview.com/the-morning-jolt/how-much-of-a-risk-do-our-children-face/

Late last week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued a health alert about a “recently reported multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children (MIS-C) associated with coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19).” The syndrome is described as “severe inflammatory responses with Kawasaki disease-like features” — a high fever that lasts, abdominal pain so serious some parents initially think it’s a burst appendix, and for many kids, diffuse rashes. The good news is that this inflammatory response is still pretty rare — a couple hundred cases in a country with about 50 million kids under age twelve — and fatal reactions are rare among those who catch this syndrome. Most of the kids seem to heal just fine. But one of the few silver linings of this virus in the early months of this pandemic had been the belief that children were not vulnerable to it. This inflammatory syndrome is the sort of factor that greatly complicates decisions about reopening schools in the fall and whether to go ahead with any summer programs. A couple of days ago, the Washington Post’s Josh Rogin offered one of the most disturbing and unnerving thoughts since the beginning of this crisis: “Either the Chinese government knew nothing about the delayed effects COVID19 has on children (which seems unlikely) or they knew about it but didn’t tell us. We must find out which of these is true.”