Emergency Medicine Physician Addresses Pediatric Care And COVID-19

Press release from the SSM Health St. Clare Hospital - Fenton:

by Rachel Charney, MD, SSM Health Emergency Medicine Physician

As a pediatric emergency medicine doctor specializing in disaster management, I experienced COVID-19 in a unique way. As I watched the early information, last January, I thought through all the plans we had for pandemics at Cardinal Glennon—managing surges of patients and expanding our capacity for sick, hospitalized babies and kids. Instead, the developing literature seemed to suggest that kids weren’t experiencing COVID-19 in the same was adults, and by late March we found ourselves with a half-full hospital.

Studies and observations have since confirmed what we noticed back in March—our children, especially our younger children, are not acquiring nor getting the severity of COVID-19 that adults are. While they have and absolutely can become gravely ill with either COVID-19 or the novel Multi-System Inflammatory Syndrome in Children (MIS-C), they are hospitalized at much lower rates than adults, and have a significantly higher rate of asymptomatic disease. The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) report from August 27, 2020 noted that children have represented both a low percentage of infections, lower rate of the hospitalizations, and extremely few deaths. While milder, kids are still mostly likely to display fever and cough as their main symptoms.

Despite all of this, kids can catch COVID-19, and still can transmit this illness, plus since August the prevalence of COVID-19 is rising in children. Pandemic planning teams throughout St. Louis continue to consider all of this information as we form recommendations and plans to both protect our children and community, as well as find the safest and best ways to let our kids continue to be kids.

FIND OUT MORE INFORMATION ACCESSING SAFE CARE DURING COVID19

This press release was produced by the SSM Health St. Clare Hospital - Fenton. The views expressed are the author's own.