When Samantha Geer hears parents downplay COVID-19 infection in children or push school districts to make masks optional for children not yet vaccinated, the Niles mother of two doesn’t hold back with anger.
“It infuriates me,” said Geer, whose 7-year-old son spent 12 days in pediatric intensive care last year due to a post-COVID-19 illness that has since been diagnosed in more than 4,000 other children nationwide. “Even on my worst enemy I wouldn’t wish anyone to see their child on a ventilator. No parent should have to see that.”
Last March, at the very start of the pandemic, Geer’s son Kendrick Moore, a second-grader at Culver School in Niles, fell ill with a fever that wouldn’t break. Four days later, he was in Advocate Children’s Hospital in Park Ridge, where he would spend the next 12 days, one of them on a ventilator helping him to breathe.
Initially, Geer said, doctors were unsure what exactly was causing Kendrick’s myriad symptoms, which included heart failure, inflammation of his heart, pancreas and gall bladder, low blood pressure, gastrointestinal disorders, and a rash.
“Every day they would fix something and then a new symptom would come up,” Geer recalled. “They couldn’t put all the pieces together.”
Eventually, Kendrick, who also has asthma, was diagnosed with multi-system inflammatory syndrome in children (MIS-C), an illness associated with COVID-19 infection. Though he had not tested positive for the virus, it is believed he contracted it earlier (possibly before testing became common), was asymptomatic and no longer had evidence of the virus by the time he began showing symptoms of MIS-C, his mother said.
Dr. Juanita Mora, an allergist and immunologist who treated Kendrick, said he was one of the first children in the country to be diagnosed with the syndrome after doctors began seeing cases popping up in the United Kingdom early in the pandemic.
As of June 28, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had reported nearly 4,196 cases of MIS-C in children nationwide, 37 of them resulting in death, Mora said.
Alicia Lopez-Ateca’s four-year-old daughter Amelia Ateca was also diagnosed with MIS-C last year, shortly after the pandemic began, according to her mother and Advocate Health Care, which shared Amelia’s story on social media sites.
Hospitalized for 17 days
Lopez-Ateca, of Jefferson Park, said her daughter’s first symptom was a headache, followed by fever and chills.
After five days in the hospital and her breathing affected, Amelia was moved to Advocate Children’s Hospital’s (in Park Ridge) pediatric intensive care, her mother said.
“I sat outside, waiting for them to talk to me when I heard over the loud speaker, ‘Intubation team to pediatric ICU’ — and I just knew,” Lopez-Ateca said.
Her instincts were correct: It was Amelia who was the patient in need of a ventilator.
“At this point, her entire abdomen and heart were filled with fluid,” Lopez-Ateca said. “She was declining. She needed major interventions.”
Amelia was placed in a coma and spent seven days on a ventilator. She was hospitalized for a total of 17 days, her mother said.
After four months of medication for her heart and six months of physical therapy, Amelia recovered, seemingly without any lasting effects, Lopez-Ateca said. Amelia recently turned 6 years old.
“I always say, you wouldn’t believe what she went through and what she overcame,” she said.
Long-lasting, troubling symptoms
For Kendrick Moore, the road to recovery has been a rocky one. Now 9 years old, he is dealing with neurological effects from his illness, his mother and doctor said. Headaches, forgetfulness and anxiety are among the symptoms he is grappling with, Geer said.
“There are days when the sparkle is just gone from his eyes,” she said. “I don’t know how to explain it, but you just know when you’re a mom.”
Though both Kendrick and Amelia tested negative for COVID-19 at the time they arrived for treatment, the multi-organ symptoms they exhibited in the hospital match those of COVID-19 complications seen in other children, said Mora, the immunologist. “It’s one of the dreaded complications of COVID-19 that happens in kids,” she said. “We see it at a rate of one per one million cases of COVID.”
Why some children develop the syndrome is still unknown, Mora noted.
“That’s the million dollar question,” she said.
The CDC notes that it, too, is still learning about the syndrome and how children are affected.
“We don’t know why some children have gotten sick with MIS-C and others have not,” the CDC said on its website. “We also do not know if children with certain health conditions are more likely to get MIS-C. These are among the many questions CDC is working to try to understand.”
What is known is that 62% of the documented cases of MIS-C are children who are African-American or Hispanic, Mora said.
Neither Amelia nor Kendrick returned to in-person schooling last year. With COVID-19 vaccines not yet available to children under 12, both Lopez-Ateca and Geer have concerns about their children returning to school for the 2021-22 school year.
“It puts them as sitting ducks in the classroom,” Lopez-Ateca said of the virus and the new, highly contagious delta variant.
When other parents comment that COVID-19 is not dangerous for children, Lopez-Ateca says she laughs, but without humor.
“It’s very real, it very much affects children,” she said. “They just haven’t seen it.”
Geer said she has neighbors who are flippant about mask wearing, despite knowing about her son’s illness.
“They’ve said stuff to the kids outside, like ‘Take off your mask,’” she said.
Both mothers say that masks should be mandatory in schools, even as a few parents have called upon school boards to make them optional when school resumes.
In a message to parents, Culver School, where Kendrick attends, said students and staff will continue wearing masks when the school year resumes.
“Masks should be mandatory since there are still breakthrough infections and because I think people just don’t realize the science,” Geer said. “I don’t get it.”
Mora, the doctor, said mask wearing is “especially effective” in decreasing transmission of COVID-19 in school settings.
“It’s not only protecting kids from this dreaded complication, but it’s protecting younger children who are not eligible for the vaccine,” she said.
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Two local children hospitalized for severe COVID-19 complications, which cause lasting health problems - Chicago Tribune
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