The Latest: Kids showing rare symptoms

Alexandra Sifferlin

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Medium Coronavirus Blog

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3 min readMay 11, 2020

Dear Reader,

While it still seems children are much less likely to get infected with Covid-19, there are some alarming reports of a mysterious syndrome showing up in young kids.

Kawasaki disease is a rare inflammatory disorder that has killed three young children in New York and sickened tens of others. While scary for parents, it’s important to keep in mind that the syndrome is very rare, and nearly all kids who have been treated have recovered.

In other news, the United States continues to lift some lockdown measures, despite not having widespread testing and contract tracing in place. Other countries, like New Zealand, are also lifting stay-at-home orders, but they reached the milestone of zero new cases in a day. The global community will likely learn a lot about what works and what doesn’t over the next several weeks.

What’s New:

White House staffers test positive: Vice President Mike Pence’s press secretary, Katie Miller, tested positive for the virus on Friday. The news came a day after one of the president’s military valets also tested positive.
Dr. Anthony Fauci in modified quarantine: Due to a potential “low-risk” Covid-19 exposure from a White House staffer, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases will work remotely from home and wear a mask continually for 14 days. He also told CNN he may go to his office if he is the only one there. Fauci will also be tested for the virus every day and so far has tested negative.
South Korea faces flare-up of cases: More than 50 new cases have been tied to people visiting nightclubs and bars, which have now been ordered to close. (Read more.)

Need some tips for how to cope? Writer Markham Heid dug through studies of centenarians and people who live long (and through wars, pandemics, and more) to learn what they have in common. It’s a combination of genetics, lifestyle, and attitude.

Follow our Medium Coronavirus Blog for regular updates, and read some of the essential stories we’ve curated below.

Be well,

Alexandra Sifferlin
Editor, Medium Coronavirus Blog

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A Quick Q&A:

If I had Covid-19 but never any symptoms, am I some kind of superhuman?
“We don’t know yet, [but] there’s a sense that much of the asymptomatic infections are in the younger individuals. [We need to] figure out the whole biology of asymptomatic infection: Who are they? What kind of immune response do they make? Why are they asymptomatic in the first place? Is it their innate immune response was more vigorous? There’s a huge number of immunological questions.” — Warner Greene, MD, PhD, director of the Gladstone Center for HIV Cure Research and a professor of microbiology and immunology at the University of California, San Francisco.

Read the story here.