Speaker 1: Welcome to Prognosis. I'm Laura Carlson. It's stay sixty one.
Speaker 1: Since coronavirus was declared a global pandemic our main story.
Speaker 1: For a long time, it seemed like the only reassuring
Speaker 1: thing about the virus was that children were unlikely to
Speaker 1: get very sick from it. That idea is being challenged, though,
Speaker 1: as a new COVID nineteen related illness has begun to
Speaker 1: appear in children around the world. But first, here's what
Speaker 1: happened today. New York City, the epicenter of the outbreak
Speaker 1: in the US, is likely to stay locked down into June.
Speaker 1: That's according to its bare build Blasio. Some parts of
Speaker 1: the eight will be able to reopen from Friday, but
Speaker 1: the city hasn't made enough progress in cutting down on
Speaker 1: new cases. That's even though hospital and intensive care admissions
Speaker 1: are falling. Deblasio also said health officials will turn to
Speaker 1: dozens of small, private, neighborhood medical practices to aid in testing,
Speaker 1: contact tracing, and outpatient care around the country. A promising
Speaker 1: new COVID nineteen drug may be hard to come by.
Speaker 1: Gilead Sciences is donating vials of its COVID nineteen drug
Speaker 1: ram desevere to countries around the world, but the US
Speaker 1: will get less than half. Gilead is donating about enough
Speaker 1: to treat seventy eight thousand hospitalized patients, according to the
Speaker 1: Department of Health and Human Services, but more than three
Speaker 1: hundred thousand patients in the US are eligible for emergency
Speaker 1: access to the drug that won't be available through the
Speaker 1: end of July. More data is showing the virus's disproportionate effects.
Speaker 1: We know that Black Americans are dying at alarmingly high
Speaker 1: rates of COVID nineteen, but a new Bloomberg News analysis
Speaker 1: shows that majority black counties have triple the COVID nineteen
Speaker 1: death rate of others. The larger a county's share of
Speaker 1: Black residents, the worse the health outcomes get. In counties
Speaker 1: where African Americans are a higher proportion of the population
Speaker 1: than they are in the US, the death rate is
Speaker 1: roughly double the national average. That's according to an analysis
Speaker 1: of Johns Hopkins University and Census Bureau data. In majority
Speaker 1: Black counties, deaths from coronavirus are more than triple. The
Speaker 1: disparities have only grown as the death toll has climbed.
Speaker 1: In South Korea, confirmed cases of Good nineteen suddenly increased
Speaker 1: after a lull that has sparked fears of a potential
Speaker 1: second wave of infections. The latest surge is tied to
Speaker 1: a single infected twenty nine year old who visited nightclubs
Speaker 1: and Seoul. Since he did, at least fifty four cases
Speaker 1: have been traced to the clubs, according to the Korea
Speaker 1: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Authorities are estimating between
Speaker 1: six to seven thousand people could have been exposed to
Speaker 1: the virus from clubs between April nine and May six.
Speaker 1: Souls Mayor has ordered all nightclubs and similar establishments in
Speaker 1: the capital to close, and now our main story. Last week,
Speaker 1: a five year old boy in New York died from
Speaker 1: COVID nineteen related complications. Dozens of other children are becoming
Speaker 1: sick with a similar cluster of symptoms. They mirror a
Speaker 1: rare condition called Kawasaki disease. The rise of this new
Speaker 1: threat to children opens up a terrifying possibility. Have we
Speaker 1: been wrong about how the disease affects kids. The accepted
Speaker 1: wisdom had been that children could transmit the virus but
Speaker 1: not get sick from it. The new illness is throwing
Speaker 1: that assumption into question. Jason Gale talked to the world's
Speaker 1: leading expert on Kawasaki disease to help unpack what's going on.
Speaker 1: You might have heard of a pox body. It's a
Speaker 1: social gathering where children are deliberately exposed to an infectious disease,
Speaker 1: like chicken pox. These parties were sometimes done before vaccines
Speaker 1: were widely available to speed up immunity, in the belief
Speaker 1: that some illnesses experienced as children would result in less
Speaker 1: severe disease then if the infection occurred in adulthood. But
Speaker 1: the practice has survived to modern times, usually hosted by
Speaker 1: vaccination skeptics, and there are signs the spirit of the
Speaker 1: Fox Party exists in our Washington State county, where people
Speaker 1: allegedly called the coronavirus from such events. Washington State health
Speaker 1: officials say that deliberately catching the pandemic virus can be
Speaker 1: incredibly dangerous for obvious reasons. It puts people that increased
Speaker 1: risk for hospitalization and even death. It may also lead
Speaker 1: to an uptick in cases that will slow attempts to
Speaker 1: lift physical distancing measures and revive the economy. And there's
Speaker 1: still a lot we don't know about the virus that
Speaker 1: causes COVID nineteen, including any long term health effects. COVID
Speaker 1: nineteen seems to occur less frequently among children and they
Speaker 1: rarely get severely sick from it, but the risk for
Speaker 1: children isn't zero. In fact, in Europe and now in
Speaker 1: the United States, critically ill kids have been ending up
Speaker 1: in intensive care units with shock like symptoms. It's yet
Speaker 1: another mysterious dimension of a disease we only heard about
Speaker 1: four months ago. Stephen Powers is National Medical Director for
Speaker 1: England in the National Health Service. He told reporters recently
Speaker 1: that these uncommon life threatening symptoms resemble Kawazarkie disease, a
Speaker 1: rare childhood illness. We have become aware in the last
Speaker 1: few days of reports of severe illness in children which
Speaker 1: might be a Kawasaki like disease. So Kawasaki disease is
Speaker 1: a very rare inflammatory condition that occurs in children. The
Speaker 1: cause is not often known. Kawazarkie disease is characterized by
Speaker 1: inflammation of blood vessels throughout the body. It's the leading
Speaker 1: cause of acquired heart disease in American children, but with
Speaker 1: effective treatment, only a small percentage of patients is left
Speaker 1: with lasting coronary uttery damage. On Wednesday last week in
Speaker 1: the lance at Medical Journal, Doctors in England describes an
Speaker 1: unprecedented cluster of eight children with something resembling the condition.
Speaker 1: One patient, a fourteen year old, needed life support but
Speaker 1: tragically died from a stroke. New York has had at
Speaker 1: least seventy three similar pediatric patients, three of them fatal.
Speaker 1: France and Italy have had cases too. This is something
Speaker 1: that is appearing in cities around the globe now that
Speaker 1: have been heavily impacted by COVID nineteen disease in the
Speaker 1: adult population. That's Professor Jane Burns. She's one of the
Speaker 1: world's top experts on camazaki disease and leads a research
Speaker 1: center dedicated to studying it at the University of California,
Speaker 1: San Diego. She's seen thousands of cases over thirty five years,
Speaker 1: and the Rady Children's Hospital where she works treats eighty
Speaker 1: to newcow psychi disease patients each year. Jane has yet
Speaker 1: to see any of these COVID nineteen related cases, but
Speaker 1: has been following the research closely, so we're getting a
Speaker 1: picture that this is something that occurs in probably genetically
Speaker 1: susceptible children as a reaction that involves previous exposure to
Speaker 1: the stars COVID two virus, and now we're seeing cases
Speaker 1: in the United States. Jane says these aren't COVID nineteen patients,
Speaker 1: but a majority have the virus or antibodies to the infection.
Speaker 1: While the cases share some signs and symptoms of Kawasaki disease,
Speaker 1: the ones that have been described during the pandemic have
Speaker 1: some additional features, so it's not certain that what they
Speaker 1: have is Kawazaki. The diseases usually diagnosed and susceptible children
Speaker 1: by the time they start school. The average age of
Speaker 1: the patients in England was about nine. I have not
Speaker 1: seen a case, so let's be clear. But um, the
Speaker 1: descriptions are more than half of them coming in with
Speaker 1: gastro intestinal symptoms, so vomiting, abdominal pain, diarrhea. Everybody has fever,
Speaker 1: so all these presentations are are significant persistent high fever. Also,
Speaker 1: six of the eight children in England were described as
Speaker 1: being of Afro Caribbean descent and five are boys. Jane
Speaker 1: says one in every sixty children in Japan gets Kwazoki disease,
Speaker 1: but no atypical cases have been seen there during the pandemic.
Speaker 1: Even still, she says, there may be genetic, racial, and
Speaker 1: social disparities at play and these need to be properly investigated.
Speaker 1: The shock syndrome that these pediatric patients experience is also
Speaker 1: more severe than what's seen in Kawasaki disease or KAD
Speaker 1: for short, and they have certain clinical differences in the
Speaker 1: nature of the shock, the way the heart is behaving.
Speaker 1: But the interesting hypothesis that this raises is that Kawasaki
Speaker 1: disease may be a syndrome that can actually be triggered
Speaker 1: in children of different genetic backgrounds by different environmental triggers.
Speaker 1: So there's an interesting question that perhaps stars Cove two
Speaker 1: virus is one of many other agents or just things
Speaker 1: in the environment that can trigger this syndrome in children
Speaker 1: who perhaps have a slightly different genetic susceptibility. And these
Speaker 1: children who are now presenting with the shock syndrome, and
Speaker 1: the children who are getting the typical KD in these
Speaker 1: same communities, maybe the these our children who were never
Speaker 1: going to get Kawasaki disease in their life until they
Speaker 1: came across this virus that's been unleashed onto the world.
Speaker 1: Jane says, probably about one children worldwide have been diagnosed
Speaker 1: with the syndrome during the pandemic. That compares with some
Speaker 1: four million COVID nineteen cases. What's really intriguing to me
Speaker 1: as a Kawasaki disease researcher is that at the same
Speaker 1: time these desperately ill children are being seen, there has
Speaker 1: been a dramatic uptick in the same communities of children
Speaker 1: with typical Kawasaki disease. Whatever it is behind the syndrome
Speaker 1: that's sometimes leading to desperate cardiovasculate collapse, the effect that
Speaker 1: children are responding to the same treatment used for Kawasaki disease,
Speaker 1: Jane says patients can usually be cued in a matter
Speaker 1: of day with the infusions of a blood based therapy
Speaker 1: called immunoglobulin, but they need to get it within their
Speaker 1: first week of illness. The other good news is that
Speaker 1: the disease is relatively easy to diagnose. Parents can easily
Speaker 1: make the diagnosis. You don't have to have to have
Speaker 1: gone to medical school. It's fever, bloodshot eyes, red lips
Speaker 1: and tongue, swollen hands and feet, and red palms and solos,
Speaker 1: and so it should be empowering to parents that they
Speaker 1: can recognize this disease and and ask for blood testing
Speaker 1: to support the diagnosis by looking for inflammation whatever it
Speaker 1: is that's causing this new life threatening illness and children.
Speaker 1: There's some solace in knowing that it's rare and that
Speaker 1: it can be easily treated. It's a reminder, though, that
Speaker 1: we still have a lot to learn about the coronavirus
Speaker 1: and to reject any invitation to a virus potty. That
Speaker 1: was Bloomberg's Jason Gail, and that's our show today. For
Speaker 1: coverage of the outbreak from one and twenty bureaus around
Speaker 1: the world, visit bloomberg dot com slash coronavirus and if
Speaker 1: you like the show, please leave us a review and
Speaker 1: a rating on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. It's the best
Speaker 1: way to help more listeners find our global reporting. The
Speaker 1: Prognosis Daily edition is hosted by Me Laura Carlson. The
Speaker 1: show was produced by Me Topher Foreheads, Jordan Gospore and
Speaker 1: Magnus Henrikson. Today's main story was reported by Jason Gail.
Speaker 1: Original music by Leo Sidrin. Our editors are Francesca Levi
Speaker 1: and Rick Shine. Francesco Levi is Bloomberg's head of podcasts,
Speaker 1: Thanks for listening.