Coronavirus: more Hong Kong children suffering from ‘worrying’ inflammation condition after recovering from Covid-19 infection, experts warn
- Since early March, 13 children diagnosed with Multisystem Inflammatory Syndrome, which can cause high fever, skin rash, diarrhoea two to five weeks after recovering from Covid-19
- Experts urge parents to watch out for symptoms after their children recover from Covid-19, and get youngsters vaccinated as soon as possible
Hong Kong is seeing an increasing number of children who have recovered from Covid-19 but are suffering from a syndrome that causes inflammation in various parts of the body, medical experts have warned, calling on parents to get their youngsters vaccinated as early as possible.
The observations, revealed in a Hospital Authority briefing on Thursday, came as the experts also found in a preliminary analysis that Covid-19 was a direct cause of at least three among a total of eight deaths involving children recorded in the city’s fifth wave of infections.
“We should not ignore the increasing number. It’s quite worrying,” said Dr Mike Kwan Yat-wah, a consultant at Princess Margaret Hospital’s paediatric infectious diseases unit, attributing the increasing number to the recent surge in local Covid-19 cases.
While the Multisystem Inflammatory Syndrome (MIS-C), associated with coronavirus infection, had not caused any death in the city, experts said related fatalities had been recorded in Britain and the United States.
So far, local experts have identified 13 children aged three to 11 – eight boys and five girls – in Hong Kong who have been diagnosed with the syndrome since early March. All of them are not fully vaccinated.
Previously, only a 10-year-old Russian boy was diagnosed with the syndrome in Hong Kong during the second wave in 2020.
Among the 11 cases that Kwan had looked at in detail, all of them had recovered from Covid-19 and had no other chronic illnesses. Seven of them required intensive care at hospitals following diagnosis of MIS-C.