Media Coverage

Dr. Marcelo Malakooti, medical director of the pediatric intensive care unit at Lurie Children’s Hospital in Chicago, said his hospital has had children with COVID-19 infections, but added, “Our numbers are not very high, but it’s really too early to know how coronavirus will affect the pediatric population at large.”

“It is not surprising that this is exaggerated,” Dr. Clyde Yancy, chief of cardiology at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine, said of NPR’s findings of the racial imbalance in deaths at nursing homes. He wrote in the Journal of the American Medical Association about the long history of racial disparities in health care and how it plays out now in this pandemic

Dr. Mehreen Arshad, a member of the Infectious Diseases Society of America and an assistant professor of pediatrics at Northwestern University in Chicago, agreed that there’s just not a lot of data on children and COVID-19 yet, especially kids with compromised immune systems. She said that immunocompromised children likely have less risk from COVID-19 than older adults do, but they may have more risk than children with healthy immune systems. She added it’s important to “take all precautions” to lessen the risk of infection for these children.

There also has to be enough testing capacity to aggressively test in advance people who aren’t yet sick but are at high risk from COVID-19, said Dr. Tina Tan, a professor of pediatrics with the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago. That includes testing both workers and patients in nursing facilities; jailors and inmates in prisons; front-line workers like transit drivers, police and firefighters; the homeless; and people in black communities that have been hit hardest by the pandemic.

Characterized by a reddish-blue discoloration of the extremities, the condition is proving particularly prevalent among kids. Amy Paller, MD, chair of the Department of Dermatology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine says that in the last few weeks, dermatologists nationwide have begun seeing an influx of the condition.

“The decision to have sex is not very different from the decision you make to be in the same room or be closer than 6 feet with a person,” says Lauren Streicher, clinical professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine. “The risk is the same.”

“If symptoms last longer than two weeks or if the symptoms impair a woman’s ability to care for herself or her family, this goes beyond typical baby blues and she should seek help,” said Dr. Emily Miller, M.D., an assistant professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine. If you fear you might hurt your baby or yourself and you are alone, call 911 or seek medical care immediately, including going to an emergency room if necessary, Dr. Miller said. If you do not think you will hurt your baby but cannot care for him or her, call a trusted family member or friend.

On the ground, experts like Dr. Melissa Simon, director of the Center for Health Equity Transformation at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, are focused on researching the effects of COVID-19 on black pregnant women and getting the word out that hospitals remain safe places for them to deliver their babies.

“Someone who’s dying from a bad pneumonia will ultimately die because the heart stops,” said Dr. Robert Bonow, a professor of cardiology at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine and editor of the medical journal JAMA Cardiology. “You can’t get enough oxygen into your system and things go haywire.”

On top of that, there may be particular effects of COVID-19, according to Dr. Robert Bonow, a cardiologist at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago. The coronavirus has proteins that attach to certain receptors in lungs. As it happens, blood vessel cells have those same receptors, Bonow explained. It’s thought that the infection may sometimes directly damage blood vessels, which can cause blood clots that lead to a heart attack.