Dr Paul Kelly, Australia’s Deputy Chief Medical Officer has discussed this new and worrying paediatric syndrome at a press conference today. The new name is pediatric inflammatory multisystem syndrome temporally associated with SARSCoV2 pandemic or PIMS-TS for short. Catchy! He described it as an autoimmune disease. The world has a new autoimmune disease – just what we didn’t need. This is consistent with my prediction in an earlier post at this blog pointing out the similarities with complications of coronavirus infection in kids and teens and an adult autoimmune disease and its associated vascular disorders.
Dr Kelly stated that there has been no increase in Kawasaki syndrome in Australia, in an apparent rebuttal of my questioning whether Australia might have cases of P that have been misdiagnosed as the similar autoimmune disease with unidentified COVID-19 infection as an underlying cause. As far as I know, a lack of increase in the rate of Kawasaki disease diagnosis in Australia should not be reassuring, because it is my understanding that in Australia and globally there has been a general decline in people attending doctor’s clinics and hospitals during the covid crisis, so you’d expect to find a decline in Kawasaki disease, not a steady rate. I guess it also needs to be stated that statistical trends in small numers of data points can be hard to discern, so with small numbers of cases of a rare disease, we could be splitting hairs. But I like splitting hairs! It keeps my mind off the deadly pandemic menace.
The autoimmune/inflammatory Kawasaki-like disorder associated with covid-19 infection in children which I have written about in some previous blog posts, now named pediatric multisystem inflammatory syndrome (PMIS), has claimed a number of young lives in New York. Given that covid-19 has been allowed to run out of control in the USA, hitting the densely populated and in parts poverty-stricken New York hard, and the state of New York has a governor who doesn’t sugar-coat or cover-up the truth about covid, it makes sense that this is a place where the real and deadly character of covid-19 infection in children and adults has been identified and documented. The UK is another “advanced” country in which covid-19 has been allowed to run out of control, and a press report from last month hinted at a cover-up of child patient deaths from PMIS.
These documented covid/PMIS deaths in young children and at least one teen raises the question of how many kids in other countries, including Australia and the UK, are infected with covid-19 or are even sick with PMIS but haven’t been correctly diagnosed and are potentially infectious? It looks like this has been happening in Australia. Are children dying of covid-19 or its complications, in “advanced” countries, without ever being identified as covid-19 cases? It now appears that there is no established scientific consensus about whether or not kids are less infectious than adults due to a lower viral load of covid-19, so every case of covid-19 in a child should be assumed to have the potential to spark a cluster that could kill. There seems to be a false-negative problem with covid-19 tests in children, even in countries with supposedly advanced medical systems. So why are some Australian states allowing schools to open in the absence of widespread operating public covid-19 surveillance testing regimes of asymptomatic people of all ages, with covid-19 tests that reliably work in child cases? Will Australian politicians now stop saying that covid-19 in children is generally mild while dismissing spread of covid-19 in schools as “not a problem for students”?
By greenearrings
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Posted in Uncategorized
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Tagged Autoimmune Diseases, Coronavirus, COVID-19, Diagnosis, Inflammation, Kawasaki disease, Pediatric multisystem inflammatory syndrome, PIMS-TS, PMIS, Surveillance, Tests, Viruses
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Am I a super-recognizer? 