“Mortality, thankfully, is low but that doesn’t mean there’s not morbidity,” Randolph said. “Some have go to rehab, some go home on oxygen.”
Randolph had been studying MIS-C and severe Covid-19 as part of an earlier study backed by $2.1 million from the CDC. The work was renewed May 4 and will look at whether the virus is taking a bigger toll on children, Randolph said.
She plans to go back through data over the past few months as she and her team collect new reports—some 50 pages long—from a nationwide network of pediatric health centers. If they find worrisome patterns, they’ll “report findings as soon as we can,” she said.
Randolph has found that children with severe Covid-19 tend to have underlying conditions that make them susceptible, just like adults. But pediatric MIS-C patients tend to be healthy and without Covid-19 symptoms. The study will also examine vaccine effectiveness in children.
“The question is, what is B.1.1.7 going to do in the many states that are out there with lower vaccination rates? And we just don’t know that,” said Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, who also advised President Joseph Biden on Covid-19 during his transition.
Children may be more vulnerable in states with low vaccination rates. Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, Wyoming and Idaho are the five worst-performing when measured by percent of population with at least one shot, according to the Bloomberg Vaccine Tracker. Most aren’t seeing a rise in cases currently. That could change.
“Last summer, we saw a huge surge in cases in these Southern states, likely tied to people going into air conditioning in the hot summer months,” said Megan Ranney, an emergency physician and researcher at Brown University in Rhode Island. “If vaccination rates do not increase, it is likely there will be recurrent surges.”
The risk for kids will likely come from afterschool programs and seeing their friends, rather than classroom activities themselves, she said.
“When kids go back to school, they also go back to socializing, the extracurricular activities” Ranney said. “In those situations, they’re often not masked, not in well-ventilated spaces.”
This article was provided by Bloomberg News.