Post-Covid heart damage in some children: study
news.uthscsa.edu
news.uthscsa.edu
So does that mean there are only a total of 662 cases reported worldwide? Because if so, this doesn't seem to be a significant issue.
Edit: yes, it seems like there are only a few hundred cases in the US [0], not a significant risk. I've seen this article in a few places and everyone seems to interpret it as saying a significant portion of children have a damaged heart after COVID, which just isn't true. Not a problem with the article, just peoples critical thinking skills.
[0] https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/covid-data/infogra...
My money is on this being between rare and uncommon because I'd expect to hear more specific reports on it. Widespread things surface a lot faster.
Pre caution. Pre. You can’t wait for all the data and then decide. That’s postcaution.
It’s also fair to say there’s been an awful lot of fud. Not least is the whole “reinfections” business. Your immune system mounted a sufficient response to clear the virus and then just immediately forgot how? That would be an absolute novelty to medical science.
Is it possible that your risk assessment of the virus is too heavily influenced by the confounding variable of your own personal fear?
Indian politicians have mastered https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_fraud
We’re not anywhere at the point where we have a clear picture of the long term health consequences of this disease because enough time has not passed since it began spreading.
This is an initial review of a troubling new complication. It will likely take years for us to understand it’s full effects, whatever they are or are not.
Now it is very possible that we will realize that over the period of years, some significant percentage of children with COVID are affected by this. But so far the data doesn't support this.
- The papers "Discussion" section concludes with: "MIS-C is rare but the potential long-term sequelae from this disease are currently unknown."
Also, the fact that it says:
- ”Children might have no symptoms, no one knew they had the disease, and a few weeks later, they may develop this exaggerated inflammation in the body.“ and then a few sentences later - "...100% had fever, 73.7% had abdominal pain or diarrhea, and 68.3% suffered vomiting."
Seems contradictory.
It makes it put into context. Literally any virus, bacteria, fungi or parasite can cause myocarditis. There are about 200,000 cases of it per year.
https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/myocarditis
My friend’s eight year old daughter had a cold about 9 years ago that turned into myocarditis. A year on the heart transplant list using some unapproved device from Mexico to assist her heart beating, the a heart transplant, then rejection a couple years later and then a second heart transplant. From a cold.
> Case studies also show MIS-C can strike seemingly healthy children without warning three or four weeks after asymptomatic infections, said Alvaro Moreira, MD, MSc, of The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio. Dr. Moreira, a neonatologist, is an assistant professor of pediatrics in the university’s Joe R. and Teresa Lozano Long School of Medicine.
It becomes problematic when the inflammation is unusually severe, although I believe that in practice it's just never diagnosed unless it's severe enough to impact your quality of life.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/23/sports/ncaafootball/colle...
If we screened kids who merely tested positive and found 15% had serious longer term reprecussions, how would this change opinion surrounding policy?
Myocarditis should be watched for, but it’s critically important that we discuss severity and relative occurrence rather than reducing the discussion to a binary yes/no.
Sadly, whenever you see a news article that omits specific statistics it’s prudent to check the facts. It’s easy to drive clicks by removing critical details to make side effects sound more permanent or more common than they are.
”But as Daniels’s survey awaits the rigors of peer review, it has received scant attention, in part because Ohio State has refused to make public any testing data about its athletes”
So this is an unpublished, un-peer-reviewed paper where the data aren’t available. Basically, someone said something, and the New York Times reported it as fact. That’s simply incredibly irresponsible. So far we’ve seen one of these myocarditis scares debunked completely:
https://mobile.twitter.com/ProfDFrancis/status/1298499595056...
and just yesterday, the Penn State doctor had to apologize for admitting that the “30% of all athletes have myocarditis” headline he instigated was essentially hearsay:
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nj.com/rutgersfootball/2020...
We should be very careful about extrapolating any sort of pre-publication data in this area.
I'd say it's a problem with the ways news outlets and articles in general phrase headlines. "Post-Covid syndrome" implies it happens after getting covid. Yet if you read the article: "[MIS-C], believed to be linked to COVID-19..."
So really headline should say something like: "MIS-C, a syndrome linked to <1% of children post-covid, damages children's hearts."
There is also never causality discussed in all these post-covid syndrome articles.
With many millions of confirmed cases, you are guaranteed that some people who have had covid will get unrelated diseases later on after recovering. With <1% of cases linked I don't think this is worth worrying about.
We don't know what percentage of children without this inflammatory condition have heart damage. In fact it's probably true based on the monitoring of college football players, we just don't know for sure yet.
Original correction:
https://twitter.com/BonaguraESPN/status/1301644428025540608
Mayo Clinic doctor's who's been advising may sports leagues came out contradicting it.
https://twitter.com/MJAckermanMDPhD (there's a lot here in recent posts)
And here is a more complete interview with him as a followup to this a couple of days ago:
http://dailyorange.com/2020/09/mayo-clinic-doctor-advises-my...
Other team numbers that don't show any significance cases (in Clemson's case, 0 occurrences).
https://twitter.com/ADavidHaleJoint/status/13015813652389560...
NFL has also had zero (trying to locate that source).
A large portion of the internet is now of the thinking that 1 is too many. They will not admit it but they are anti-abortionists in their thinking and in their behavior. No matter what numbers or facts they see it does not change their emotional response - much like an anti-abortionist.
This large portion of the internet follows the media to find something new to be scared of each day. As soon as they find out a study or news article wasn't correct they latch on to the next study in an attempt to justify their fear.
This large portion of the internet also claims they follow "the science". They do not. They follow whatever scary story is in the news that day. As the days go by more and more facts pile up that this virus was never the threat we thought it was - yet they disregard it and continue to say they follow "the science".
More and more information piles up every day yet they don't change their mind or their position. Just like those anti-abortionists. Just like science deniers.
Between BLM and COVID, neo-puritanism is in full swing.
I've changed political parties because of it.
It's fascinating watching this madness take hold of the world and hear people actually say thinks like:
"Don't think for yourself, let the experts do it for you"
"I think people should be FORCED to do the reasonable thing"
Cancel culture and PC culture have destroyed numerous careers in the court of popular opinion even if exonerated in the legal system.
Newspapers and media are censoring things at levels not seen in quite some time.
Brave new world were entering.
Democracy is at risk but not from where were being told.
This article was submitted to HN a month ago. Got 9 upvotes. Too true and too real.
The Cancel Culture Checklist: Six signs that show you're not just being criticized; you're being canceled.
https://www.persuasion.community/p/the-cancel-culture-checkl...
Sweden has beaten Coronavirus with no mask law, with no quarantine, and their deaths per capita are on par with the average of Europe.
If you try to debate using an arbitrary categorization like 'nordic countries' please provide citations for why that arbitrary categorization is more useful than then comparisons with the category of Europe in aggregate.
In reality, many folks are already living with significant nerve damage from HSV-1 and EBV (Epstein-Barr Virus -- common cause of mononucleosis), and that's kind of old news these days.
EBV/mono, for example, would often cause tiredness for months on end, due to the permanent Central Nervous System (CNS) damage. It's very common as well -- much more so than COVID19; the neverending tiredness as a result of mono is very common as well. Yet when was the last time EBV made the news?
Then we use the fear to impose rules that severely affect 100% of the children: for example not letting people go outside or go to school.
All part of the relentless propaganda of scaremongering where the weak want everyone to be equally afraid.
/s
See, the argument is the same.
In the olden days these folks were limited in the way they spread their fear. To their family, to their neighbors, but no further. But now they can fuel the anxieties of others will simultaneously to justify their position by posting on the internet - a medium that reaches billions.
Another aspect is that so many people profit from this. Celebrities big and small use it for attention. The media does what it can to get eyeballs. Joe Keyboard gets dopamine hits from the upvotes he got on his IG post that was grandstanding about the virus. Even me right now as I type this.
Stop the fear spreading. Take away all of the dumb unnecessary "safety" features (1 way shopping isles anyone?). Let people CHOOSE to go outside or inside, to work or not to work, to wear a mask or not to wear a mask.
That's all I'm lookin for. You want to be scared? Be scared but don't impose your beliefs (your fears) on me or others. Let US choose, not a small loud mob.
But I haven’t been keeping track recently.
Could you indicate your source and credentials?
Is Kawasaki syndrome already considered a post-viral problem?
Are you saying these children had Kawasaki already, or that Covid19 infection causes Kawasaki?
My credentials are in math and engineering, not medicine.
However, due to unfortunate personal and family issues, I've read tens of medical papers and found statistical errors in many, maybe most of them -- I have literally saved at least one person from a life of misery based on finding these errors (and got apologies from department heads in two of the world's 10 top hospitals)
I don't know if Kawasaki is considered a post viral problem - either officially or unofficially. I did not look at the disease mechanics, only at disease prevalence. Symptoms are close enough (and the disease having a clinical description, NO direct biomarkers) that mis-identification is a real problem and known issue with these kinds of rare diseases.
The disease I'm very familiar with, unfortunately, shares a lot with kawasaki - including in how often it is misidentified as some benign condition. It was considered, though never proved, a post-viral autoimmune disease for years -- and likely still is by many doctors -- even though the "post viral" aspect is overwhelmingly a secondary aspect (something has to trigger the immune system, it's sometimes a viral episode, sometimes a vaccine, sometimes spontaneously)
> They clearly considered Kawasaki as a comparison too.
Kawasaki is a clinically identified disease, as is MIS-C. There's no specific biomarker to say "this is one and not the other". Right now, everything COVID-19 is shiny and well funded, whereas older things are not.
> Is Kawasaki syndrome already considered a post-viral problem?
As of a few months ago, at least half of the MIS-C cases were, to the best of everyone's knowledge, unrelated to COVID-19. see e.g. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6... which summarizes the state-of-the-art of knowledge as of May (The lancet is written in a confusing way, but https://www.dicardiology.com/article/kawasaki-inflammatory-d... is more clear - the relation to COVID-19 is not clear cut)
Here's a similar point: Last I checked, a few weeks ago, death from the flu all over the world has gone to zero, though in european countries and most of the US since June, death is as expected (statistically indistinguishable from expected rate of death). Flu death has gone to zero; COVID death exists when non did before. What's more likely - that FLU disappeared overnight but COVID has exactly the same rate of death? Or that both COVID and flu take a toll on the weaker and immune suppresed population (whose size didn't really change), but that the deaths are all attributed to COVID even though part (perhaps a third or half) as attributable to the flu? See e.g. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/21/world/coronav... - despite the April time, it IS up-to-date as of 22-aug, and you can definitely see the COVID death toll in europe on Mar-Jun -- but not anymore.
> Are you saying these children had Kawasaki already, or that Covid19 infection causes Kawasaki?
It is my belief based on knowledge of diseases OTHER than Kawasaki was that the predisposition was there, just waiting for the trigger, and would likely have erupted sooner or later, because of a flu, another virus, or some vaccine -- autoimmune diseases are often triggered when the immune system goes into high gear but them something goes wrong and they start attacking the body instead.
I am not saying they had Kawasaki already -- they obviously did not, because -- by definition -- Kawasaki is a set of symptoms (they did not have). However, I'm hypothesizing that everything was ready for Kawasaki, and something just caused it to erupt. It's also possible that COVID-19 was that trigger, and that it causes a slightly different disease progression than "standard" Kawasaki, although there's no such thing either- these diseases are never textbook cases of "These 10 symptoms == kawasaki", but rather "If we have more than 4 out of this list of 14 then we will label it Kawasaki unless we have a better explanation".
I am being vague with specific details of the diseases I am familiar with, so as not to out myself - it's rare enough that everyone involved knows everyone else on a first name basis. (Though as far as anyone's concerned, I might as well be a dog on the internet)
> The literature reports that MIS-C typically manifests 3-4 weeks after SARS-CoV-2 infection. This may explain why many children had positive antibodies to SARS- CoV-2, but negative RT-PCR at the time of MIS-C evaluation.
> While children with COVID-19 present with upper respiratory symptoms, MIS-C is distinguishable by fever (100%), vomiting (68.2%), and abdominal pain/diarrhea (73.8%). The abdominal pain in MIS-C can be so severe that in several cases patients were presumed to have appendicitis.
Young children seem to be protected from lower respiratory manifestations of COVID-19. My reading of this meta-analysis is that MIS-C is primarily a gastrointestinal manifestation of COVID-19 that has progressed to vascular and other tissues that express ACE2 receptors.
Perhaps we are placing too much emphasis on nasopharyngeal swab PCR tests and should consider anal swabs for children with gastrointestinal symptoms.
[1] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/eclinm/article/PIIS2589-5...
We are talking about the human body a lot more now the media can make a headline.
If this is from C19 one imagines many other things we don't care about kids getting also can do it.
This title unquestionably is missing critical context, and arguably crosses the line into clickbait.
> Another finding from the case studies: Almost half of patients who had MIS-C had an underlying medical condition, and of those, half of the individuals were obese or overweight.
Like 60% of America is obese or overweight, that is way over 200 Million Americans [1]. I don't understand why people try to use this to downplay (I'm not saying you are) COVID.
In reality, a significant portion of the people reading this comment probably are "overweight" without even realizing it. "Overweight" is classified by your BMI, and the threshold for "overweight" is much lower than most expect.
If you are 5'6" and weigh 155 lbs, you are medically overweight. That's someone who wears size 31 pants and size small t-shirts. Not even close to your stereotypical "fat" person, but according to the statistics: overweight.
edit to clarify: I intentionally put "overweight" in quotes to indicate that I am using the medical definition of "overweight", and I am not saying that someone who is 5'6" and 155 lbs is unhealthy, fat, or needs to lose weight. Someone who is 5'6" and 155 lbs is, IMO, on the fitter side of the spectrum, but according to the statistics, still "overweight".
———-
This is foolish. BMI is used to estimate population averages. But waist measure is vastly better. Someone with a waist of 31 at 5’6” actually has close to ideal portions, if you’re talking about a man. (For women you need the hip measure too).
That’s a waist to height ratio of about .47. A person with that waist probably has a high muscle mass + low body fat.
Now, if the same person was 155, 5’6” and had a 34 inch waist, they are almost certainly overweight.
https://trustyspotter.com/blog/perfect-male-body-measurement... https://www.omnicalculator.com/health/Waist_Height
Both people will show up as “overweight” in population averages, which isn’t an issue as edge cases balance out over the whole population. But you’re talking as though such a person with a 31 inch waist should actually lose weight.
No, I'm not. I never said such a thing and I have no idea why you're building such a strawman.
Waist measure has nothing to do with this story. This story is about COVID-19 comorbidities, of which being overweight (which is medically measured using BMI, not waist measures) is one. BMI is all that matters in this context.
If you are 5'6" and 155 lbs, you are classified as overweight and thus are considered a high-risk person for COVID-19. That has nothing to do with "you should/should not lose weight".
And the broader point is this: if you see any stats saying "most COVID-19 deaths were overweight people", you shouldn't feel any sense of "safety" because you think "well I'm not overweight, I wear size small!", because there's a good chance that a lot of those COVID deaths wore smalls, too.
This is absolutely false. It is the adiposity that raises risk. High muscle mass is not a risk factor. You’re got an erratic view of what we mean by overweight: we mean excessively adipose.
I took it as implied that you thought overweight people should lose weight for health reasons, but that isn’t the central point.
BMI approximates population averages and is useful as such, but for an individual the correct question to ask is whether they are excessively adipose. Someone at 5’6” with a 31 inch waist and a weight of 155 is almost certainly not excessively adipose.
Someone 5'6" and 155 lbs is overweight and thus is considered a high risk COVID individual, regardless of their waist size. If that person were to die of COVID, they would be reported as "had high-risk underlying health conditions".
That's what we're talking about in this context. Everything else you are talking about is completely irrelevant.
Responding to your above edit (which you now have removed):
>I agree many people underestimate their own adiposity, but the given example of 31 inch waist at 5’6” and 155 pounds indicates a trim, fit person.
This statement just highlights the entire point. You think it means "trim, fit person", as do most others. But the medical definitions do not agree with you. According to the medical definition, that person is overweight. That's the bottom line.
Rereading OP’s comment I see they’re instead talking about people downplaying covid because they think it only affects people who are morbidly obese. My mistake.
Though, I suspect probably at least 80% of the people in the overweight/obese category legitimately have too much fat. Especially in america. Compared to the rest of the oecd, america has a much larger portion of “morbidly obese” within the obese category.
BMI does also underestimate obesity in some. On average it’s a reasonable definition of overweight/obese. The example you gave is an edge case, but the studies concern themselves with averages.
As someone who is 5'7" and 160 pounds, I'm considered "overweight", but if you saw me in person I'm almost certain you wouldn't think of me that way because I look quite fit. In reality, I have a decent amount of muscle mass from being physically active, but the BMI measure doesn't take into consideration muscle vs fat, and thus I am technically "overweight".
My point was not that everyone who is technically "overweight" is "fat" or "unhealthy", but rather that the COVID-19 reporting statistics that use those words are also using that "terrible measure" of BMI, and according to BMI, even typically-seen-as-healthy people fall under that "high risk" category, and people should be aware of that rather than assuming they are safe from COVID just because they are "fit".
For yourself, you would make the sensible adjustment of “well I’m not overadipose and therefore do not have higher risk from that factor”. That doesn’t mean you’d have no effects, it merely means you lack one risk factor.
But overadiposity absolutely is a risk factor and those in that group should be even more careful: the more overadipose, the more so.
BMI is used that way for studies because it’s a useful measure over groups. The exceptions run both ways and balance out. It just shouldn’t be applied blindly to individuals.
The column you’re extrapolating that from is “Conditions Contributing to Deaths where COVID-19 was listed on the death certificate” not “Pre-existing conditions”.
You may believe that these illnesses were exacerbated by the virus, but that doesn’t change the fact that the vast majority of the seriously ill were not healthy before catching the virus.
* Influenza and pneumonia
* Adult respiratory distress syndrome
* Respiratory failure
* Respiratory arrest
* Cardiac arrest
Et cetera et cetera et cetera.
Are all the conditions listed in that table acute symptoms that contributed to COVID death? No.
Is it a lie to say that every person in the US whose life ended due to COVID had on average 2.6 pre-existing conditions? Yes.
Stop lying.
but that doesn’t change the fact that the vast majority of the seriously ill were not healthy before catching the virus.
2.6 pre-existing conditions as you claimed above or, now, “vast majority of the seriously ill”?
Give statistics that you can back up with data, along with definitions for “vast majority” and “seriously ill”, or you’re spreading dezinformatsia.
Indeed. There are thousands of deaths listed which were from accidents and other issues which probably should not be counted as Covid deaths. There’s obviously a fair amount of “dying with Covid” going on. Thanks for pointing that out.
”Is it a lie to say that every person in the US whose life ended due to COVID had on average 2.6 pre-existing conditions? Yes.”
Every person? Well yes, that would be a lie...which is why I didn’t say that. The data shows that over 94% of Covid deaths had, on average, 2.6 co-morbidities. Less than 6% had no co-morbidities.
But the data is quite clear on that fact. I realize it is inconvenient for the purposes of inciting panic, and you can try to twist it around any way you like to diminish it, but it’s still a fact.
If you're 6ft (183cm) tall, you can be 185-220 pounds (~84-100kg) and you fall into the overweight group.
That group has very little to fear from Covid due to weight, unless they have other serious health conditions. Being 10 or 15 pounds overweight isn't going to be a meaningful problem when dealing with Covid. If you're 80 or 100 pounds overweight - obese - that is going to be a major risk factor.
The number of people killed just by Covid in the US in the overweight group, under the age of 75, is likely to be numbered sub 1,000.
Unless you have data on this, or an understanding of the mechanism of how weight and covid exactly interacts, this is mere speculation. It wasn’t intuitive to a lot of people that BMI would be a risk factor to begin with when first covid came up. We also don’t know if the interaction is linear or quadratic or a simple cutoff. I am not saying you are necessarily wrong, but I don’t think we have the basis for such confidence on these conclusions yet.