Kawasaki disease: Rare inflammatory syndrome seen in US child with Covid-19

The child in this case was initially diagnosed with a viral infection at an urgent care, the Stanford team said. She was fussy, had a fever, and didn’t eat. She didn’t have a cough or congestion. A flu test was negative and doctors diagnosed her with a viral infection. She later tested positive for Covid-19.

On the second day she had a fever and a blotchy rash. A chest x-ray showed a small white spot in her mid-lung so doctors sent her to the emergency room, the team reported in the journal in the journal Hospital Pediatrics.

The baby’s symptoms appeared to be Kawasaki disease, so she was given intravenous immunoglobulin and high-dose aspirin, a standard treatment. Two weeks after she was discharged, she had no respiratory symptoms and is doing well.

“Kawasaki disease itself is often preceded by a respiratory or gastrointestinal illness,” Segal, who works in Child Neurology at Stanford Children’s Hospital, said. “This has been known about Kawasaki disease for quite some time. No one completely understands it, but the model suggests it’s triggered by an infection in a sort of immune dysregulation.”

Segal doesn’t believe they have seen any other cases of Kawasaki associated with coronavirus at his hospital and he thinks that if this is a complication associated with the coronavirus that is most likely uncommon.

“In this case with SARS Covid-19, I think it’s still too early to know whether it’s something specific to the pathophysiology, or if it’s just because it’s another run of the mill infection,” Segal said.

“I think this is going to be a subset, of a subset, of a subset of individuals who develop it,” Segal said. “As far as we can tell, this is something exceedingly uncommon.”