The Health Ministry is currently investigating the case of a 12-year-old girl from Bnei Brak who died unexpectedly last Thursday after complaining of chest pains.
“A 12-year-old girl who recently recovered from post-COVID syndrome arrived at the pediatric emergency room on Wednesday, May 19,” Ma’aynei Hayeshua Medical Center in Bnei Brak reported over the weekend. “She underwent prolonged resuscitation efforts by senior doctors and, unfortunately, was pronounced dead. A report was submitted, as usual, to the Health Ministry.”
The girl contracted coronavirus in February and recovered. She was hospitalized soon after for almost two weeks with pediatric inflammatory multisystem syndrome temporally associated with COVID-19 (PIMS-TS), which is similar to Kawasaki disease or toxic shock syndrome. She was later released.
Health officials are now trying to determine whether myocarditis, an inflammation of the heart muscle, caused her chest pains and or was associated with post-COVID syndrome.
“Almost all viruses” can lead to myocarditis, but given the time frame between the virus and the child’s death, it is unclear whether her cardiac illness was caused by the virus, Dr. Zachi Grossman, president of the Israel Pediatric Association, told The Jerusalem Post.
Ten Israeli children have died from COVID-19 and 2,105 have been hospitalized with the virus since the start of the pandemic, the Health Ministry reported.
Some 150 children have been hospitalized in serious condition, about half of whom required treatment in an intensive-care unit, according to Prof. Cyrille Cohen, head of Bar-Ilan University’s Laboratory of Tumor Immunology and Immunotherapy.
More than 100 Israeli children have been diagnosed with PIMS-TS, according to Grossman’s association. The Health Ministry said it did not have data on long COVID cases among children from birth until age 17.
Little is known about post-COVID syndrome, or long COVID, meaning the effects of COVID-19 that continue for weeks or months beyond the initial illness, in children because it has only begun to be addressed in scientific literature, Grossman said.
It is understood that long COVID plagues between 13% and 15% of elementary- and middle-school children, but “there can also be a problem of underreporting, and sometimes underreporting gives the impression of low prevalence,” he said. “However, when the reports are being examined later, they may disclose things that were not reported initially.”
Most of the time, the symptoms of long COVID include fatigue, shortness of breath, coughing, joint and chest pain, difficulty concentrating (brain fog), depression, headaches, intermittent fever and heart palpitations, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
A small percentage of people, mostly under the age of 30, who received the Pfizer or Moderna mRNA coronavirus vaccines have experienced myocarditis, according to the Health Ministry and the CDC. However, while health officials are examining the issue, they have not ruled out vaccination for this age cohort.
The condition often goes away without complications and has not been found to be directly caused by the vaccine.
A Health Ministry committee is analyzing the Israeli data to determine whether children between the ages of 12 and 15 should be inoculated with the Pfizer vaccine, Grossman said. The vaccine received emergency use authorization from the CDC last month.
A final decision is expected within days, Grossman said.