How Safe Are Your Kids?

While the elderly remain a priority for covid care and vaccination, the risk of infections in young children may have been overlooked

- Sonali Acharjee

When 13-year-old Sanaya Kukreja (name changed) had fever, her parents had a difficult time persuading her to get an RT-PCR test. “But since we were told children don’t get Covid, we didn’t insist on the test or medicine,” says her mother from Hyderabad, over the phone. The unrelenting fever finally subsided after six days, and the other symptoms disappeared too. However, two weeks later, Sanaya began to feel a sharp pain in her chest. When her parents took her to Hyderabad’s Apollo Hospital, she was diagnosed with MIS-C, or Multi-system Inflammatory Syndrome in Children, a condition in which the vital organs of children get inflamed two to six weeks after recovery from Covid and can be fatal if not treated in time.

Though there is no data to ascertain whether Covid has infected more children in the second wave compared to the first, the figures from states do confirm that the infection has spread among the young. Karnataka, for instance, reported 19,378 cases in children below 10 between March 2020 and September 2020, when the first wave was at its peak. From then on, until May 20 this year, the state has seen 49,257 cases in this age group. As of May 23, of the total 5.56 million Covid cases in Maharashtra, 171,335, or 3.1 per cent, were children under 10. In Delhi, the rise in under-18 cases has prompted some hospitals to set up separate Covid wards and ICUs for children.