Covid and Children: Insights from a practitioner

I am not sure if others are seeing this.

But COVID19 is still here and it is behaving very weirdly.

Young children ages 4-12 are getting sick. They are not getting "critically-ill," but are losing lots of school days and are just drained because of a new set of severe symptoms.

Adults are not getting affected.
In all of the families I have noted this, dults are all OK or says "they felt a passing flu."

But children are dispropotionately affected, losing school days, drained out of their energy and losing appetite for many days.

Runny nose is quite severe.
Something stands out - frequent, tiresome sneezing.
A strange dry cough, sometimes with a thick, tenacious phlegm or dry "whoop."
The cough is associated with severe throat pain only during active coughing.
There is a short period of 1-2 days of self-limiting breathlessness.
Coughing in children sometimes relentless, leading to vomiting from "cough-fatigue."
There is no loss of taste or smell, but there is a high level of 'alteration' of specific taste - its most commonly to "sweet" and "salty" where children feel both as "sourness or bitter."

What stands out the most is - severe fatigue and weakness, that sometimes, while standing, children get giddiness or vertigo. They sleep for hours long.

The symptom onset in subsequent exposed children are few weeks apart, not like the few days to a week we used to see in the pandemic days.

The new variants are called EG.5 [Eris] and the upcoming one is BA.2.86 [Pirola] and JN.1 [Pirola].

You wont get these fellows on standard/routine PCR tests. This is called the "pre-Covid" phenomenon. This means that people are showing signs of Covid even with a negative test and upon being tested again after a week or so, the result comes positive.

It is not progressing to critical disease and lives are not at stake immediately, but I am worried what the future might hold for our children in India when they are hit with newer variants? #Covid_19 is notorious when it comes to dyregulating the host immune system and I am seeing a lot of young adults with liver disease - especially recurrent hepatitis, neurological symptoms, and rheumatological & muskuloskeletal diseases, and unexplained liver test abnormalities after the Omicron peak of Covid, now. No one seem to talking about this.

Why are we not AT LEAST self-realizing the importance of masking in schools if we cannot protect our children by giving them preventive shots? Have we all conviniently accepted that we are going to face a barrage of post-Covid health issues in children in the future, as part of LongCovid by ignoring preventive measures that we can put in place now? more