Coronavirus medical mystery: Baby with high viral load puzzles researchers - The Washington Post

If you see a patient who has exponentially more virus and it’s a completely different variant, it is probably related.”.

Jeremy Luban, a virologist at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, said the viral load in the infant’s nose “in itself, is shocking and noteworthy.” However, he was cautious in speculating that it “could be because of N679S, or simply because it is a [newborn] with an immature immune system, permitting the virus to replicate out of control.”.

The question of the new variants’ effect on children is especially important now that the nation’s top health authority has declared that it is largely safe to reopen schools even as school systems in countries besieged by the United Kingdom variant have closed.

There’s no evidence that the variant with N679S, or others from the United Kingdom, South Africa and Brazil, are more dangerous to children.

But health officials in the United Kingdom have said they are monitoring an unusual surge in infections, especially among children ages 6 to 9, that is disproportionate to their share of the population.

In the United States, doctors at several major medical centers reported a holiday surge in hospitalizations of children that paralleled what happened in adults, and a January and February spike in cases of MIS-C — a rare but potentially fatal post-viral syndrome associated with covid-19 that occurs four to six weeks after a coronavirus infection.

But at Children’s National, DeBiasi said the hospital has been surprised to find that more MIS-C patients have needed intensive care-level support than last year.

Doctors at Boston Children’s and UCLA Health said the MIS-C cases have been more numerous because of the surge in community infections, but the course of the illness appears similar to before?

A doctor at Intermountain Primary Children’s Hospital in Salt Lake City also reported no change in the severity of cases, but said physicians have noticed that more children with MIS-C have active infections than in the past, when nearly all tested negative for the virus — prompting the group to send samples off for sequencing in recent days.

10 that the critical location of the newly documented variant in the infant — in the spike protein area that researchers think gives it an advantage in attaching to receptors in bodies — as well as evidence that it is infecting other patients in the region, “underscores the need for increased viral sequencing to monitor variant prevalence and emergence, which may have a direct impact on recommended public health measures and vaccination strategies.”.

Harvard researcher Adrienne Randolph, who is leading an international research effort on children and the coronavirus, said that in the early days of the pandemic, fewer children were infected, so they were not prioritized for sequencing.

But now that cases are surging in the youngest Americans, and the virus is evolving, the need to expand sequencing is urgent, she said.

“A couple of hospitals saying their cases are more severe in kids doesn’t mean nationally this a problem,” Randolph said.

“If you’re not capturing what’s happening in young individuals, that is shortsighted and we wouldn’t be able to fully understand how the virus may be different in people of different ages,” said Jennifer Dien Bard, director of the virology lab at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles and one of the study’s co-authors.

Another big finding in the paper, which looked at 35 children, is the sheer diversity in the variants infecting them — 97 unique changes from the original virus first identified in Wuhan, China, were sequenced — but no particular variant appeared to correlate with disease severity.

Most notably, they found five children with identical viral genomic profiles — but the course of their illnesses looked very different.

And on the flip side, the hospital saw two children with similar-seeming MIS-C cases, but each had very different viral genotypes.

Alan Beggs, a genomics expert at Boston Children’s Hospital, said the fact that N679S appears in the database — which represents a tiny portion of the virus circulating in the world — suggests that “this variant is present in some significant percentage of the population in this area.” He also said there was evidence that the eight cases had a common genetic background, indicating that all “were originated from one patient initially somewhere in the region.”