US to research on Covid-19 impact on children

Washington, March 3 : The US National Institutes of Health (NIH) has launched a new research effort to understand how COVID-19 affects children, who have accounted for roughly 13 percent of total confirmed cases in the country.
The research will investigate why some children are at greater risk for SARS-CoV-2 infection than others, why symptoms vary among children who are infected, and how to identify children at risk for severe illness from SARS-CoV-2 infection, according to a release of the NIH on Tuesday, Xinhua news agency reported.
Research will also focus on multi-system inflammatory syndrome in children (MIS-C), a life-threatening condition marked by severe inflammation of one or more parts of the body, including the heart, lungs, kidneys, brain, skin, eyes and gastrointestinal organs.
Based on current data, most children with SARS-CoV-2 infection do not develop serious illness. However, those who do go on to develop MIS-C can experience prolonged fever and severe abdominal pain and may progress to shock, according to the NIH.
About 3.17 million children in the United States have tested positive for Covid-19 since the onset of the pandemic, according to a latest report of the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) and the Children’s Hospital Association.
A total of 3,168,274 child Covid-19 cases had been reported across the country as of February 25, and children represented 13.1 per cent of all confirmed cases, according to the report.