Since late August, the CDC has seen a 12 percent jump in reports of multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children, a rare but serious immune response linked to COVID-19 infection, according to an Oct. 11 CNN report.
While rare, physicians at several U.S. children's hospitals told the news outlet they've recently been treating more MIS-C cases than earlier in the year.
"We had a nice long break from those cases over the summer and even into the fall where we could get an occasional MIS-C case here and there, but in the last three or four weeks, there has definitely been an uptick. And I would anticipate that to continue through the next several weeks," Amy Edwards, MD, an infectious disease specialist at UH Rainbow Babies & Children's Hospital in Cleveland, told CNN.
In the last four weeks, Children's Healthcare of Atlanta said they've treated 58 children with the condition — about 20 percent of all MIS-C cases they've seen so far. Still, MIS-C is considered rare, occurring in less than 5 percent of the nearly 7,400 children the hospital has treated for COVID-19, a spokesperson told the news outlet.
A rise in MIS-C cases typically follows a surge in COVID-19 cases in a hospital's area. At Children's Healthcare of Atlanta, for example, officials noticed the increase in late September, about nine weeks after the area had a spike in infections.
The CDC began tracking MIS-C case reports in May 2020. As of Oct. 4, 5,217 cases have been reported, including 46 deaths. Half of children with MIS-C were between 5 and 13 years old, CDC data shows. Additionally, 61 percent of reported cases were among Black or Hispanic children, and 60 percent were in males.