A Teenager’s Medical Mystery

The Daily

The New York Times

Daily News, News

4.4 • 102.8K Ratings

🗓️ 21 May 2020

⏱️ 32 minutes

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Summary

From the earliest days of the coronavirus outbreak, health officials believed that it was largely sparing children and teenagers. But the rise of a mysterious inflammatory syndrome — with symptoms ranging from rashes to heart failure — in children testing positive for the virus is challenging that belief. Guest: Pam Belluck, a health and science writer for The New York Times, spoke with Jack McMorrow, 14, and his parents in Queens about his experience contracting the coronavirus. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily Background reading: “If I send you home today, you’ll be dead by tomorrow.” This is what Jack heard after learning he had a mysterious illness connected to the coronavirus in children. “I would say that scared me to death but it more like scared me to life.”The new syndrome has been compared to a rare childhood illness called Kawasaki disease. But doctors have learned that it affects the heart differently and is appearing mostly in school-age children, rather than infants and toddlers.

Transcript

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0:00.0	From The New York Times, I'm Michael Vibaro.
0:02.6	This is the Daily.
0:09.5	Today, from the earliest days of the coronavirus,
0:13.8	health officials believed that it largely spared children and teenagers.
0:20.7	But recently, that belief has been challenged.
0:24.8	My colleague, Pam Bellock, on the story of a 14-year-old boy,
0:30.6	whose case is being studied to better understand the impact of the virus on children.
0:44.3	It's Thursday, May 21st.
0:47.5	Pam, when does this understanding that we all seem to have about the coronavirus,
0:56.9	and how it spares children, when does that start to change?
1:00.9	In late April, there was this bulletin that was sent out by a pediatric health service in the United Kingdom.
1:11.6	It just said, we're noticing some kids, not very many,
1:17.0	they seem to have these symptoms of inflammation.
1:21.2	We don't really know what this is about.
1:23.2	Some have tested positive for coronavirus, some haven't.
1:26.6	It was just saying, we think we're seeing something.
1:30.6	I've talked to my editors about it,
1:32.4	and we were trying to figure out whether we should
1:34.5	explore it more at that point, and we decided,
1:37.2	well, we don't really know a whole lot.
1:38.9	It seems like a small number of cases.
1:40.6	We can't even say for certain that it's connected to coronavirus.
	...

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