25 states report mysterious COVID-19 related child illness

May 22, 2020May 22, 2020 The Big Kahuna

iStock/Gargonia (NEW YORK) — New York State on Thursday updated the amount of cases linked to a new COVID-related inflammatory illness in children, announcing the numbers have risen to 157. That represents a 53 percent spike.

Since New York reported the first case of multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children (MIS-C,) as named by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 25 other states have reported cases of the mysterious illness.

“The more we look, the more we find it,” said New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, calling this new illness “more frightening than COVID respiratory illness in some ways because it inflames the heart.”

Symptoms include persistent fever, abdominal pain, rash, enlarged lymph node on one side of the neck, irritability or sluggishness, swollen hands and feet, diarrhea and vomiting.

Because of the new illness, Cuomo strongly urged parents not to send their children to day camp until health officials have a better grip on this virus and understand “how widespread it is.”

Ever since the first COVID-19 was reported in Wuhan, China, the virus has spread across the globe, infecting over five million people and killing nearly 330,000, according to data compiled by the Center for Systems Science and Engineering at Johns Hopkins University. Just two weeks a go, the rate of infected individuals worldwide crossed the four million threshold.

As nations around the world race to develop a vaccine, pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca announced Thursday that it is optimistic of a potential vaccine being developed by the University of Oxford. Due to initial promising results, AstraZeneca has ordered 400 million doses, saying it could produce up to 1 billion doses and begin delivering them in September.