The number of New York City children who have been sickened by a rare illness linked to coronavirus has now climbed to 110, after only 15 cases were identified by city health officials less than two weeks ago.
Pediatric experts are racing to understand the new syndrome, whose hyper-inflammatory symptoms have been liked to toxic shock and Kawasaki disease, which causes an inflammation of blood vessels.
"It's the the early days of this," said Dr. Adam Ratner, the director of pediatric infectious diseases at the NYU Langone Hassenfeld Children’s Hospital "The question is, because this is a rare syndrome, how do we gather enough data to understand what’s going on?"
Statewide, there are now 119 reported cases.
During his press briefing on Friday, Mayor Bill de Blasio provided a preliminary breakdown of the cases of the condition known as pediatric multisystem inflammatory syndrome (PMIS).
More than half, or 54 percent, tested positive for either the virus or the antibodies, suggesting a previous infection. Like coronavirus infections, the majority of the patients were male, 57 percent to be exact.
Most of the patients live in the Bronx (37 percent), followed by Queens (33 percent), and Brooklyn (20 percent). Manhattan and Staten Island had the fewest cases to date.
The patients were spread out fairly evenly in age, ranging from months-old babies to young adults as old as 21.
Although the city released an early racial breakdown, the race of 38 percent of the patients have not yet been identified, making it difficult to draw any conclusions.
Nonetheless, the mayor said the data appeared to be “tracking the same disparities that we’ve seen throughout this crisis."
Meanwhile, reports of cases elsewhere have been steadily growing. On Friday, hospital officials in the south of France said that a 9-year-old boy had died from the condition, the first fatality in that country.
In New York state, three children have died, including a 5-year-old boy in New York City.
Late Thursday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued a health advisory about illness to state and local health officers across the country. It was the first official acknowledgement by the CDC of the syndrome.
"I’ll wager that it's only going to go up and it’s going to be much more widespread than anyone thinks," said Governor Andrew Cuomo during his press conference on Friday.
Cuomo has said that New York would take the lead in a global research effort. As of Thursday, state health officials discovered that 16 other states, along with Washington D.C., and six countries in Europe had reported cases.
"This is not what we were told initially," the governor said, referring to the early guidance from doctors that said children were largely spared from the virus.
"As a parent that then gave me a false sense of security," he continued. "To now say we were wrong about that, this is a big about face."
