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While kids who contract SARS-CoV-2 generally don’t get severe COVID-19, evidence is accumulating that some may suffer long-lasting effects akin to what’s been dubbed long COVID in adults. Healthcare centers around the world are setting up facilities to monitor and deal with the problem, including among children.
Data from the UK Office for National Statistics released in February showed that 13 percent of COVID-19 patients under the age of 11 and about 15 percent of those aged 12 to 16 had at least one symptom more than a month after diagnosis. And in a preprint posted on medRxiv at the end of January, researchers surveying caregivers of 129 patients under the age of 18 in Rome found that more than half of the children had yet to completely recover within four months of a positive SARS-CoV-2 test, and nearly one-quarter of the children had three or ...
