“The coronavirus is kind towards children,” Sergey Sargsyan, a pediatrician and doctor at Arabkir Medical Center, said.
Nevertheless, there are young children infected with the coronavirus in Armenia. Around 30 children are currently diagnosed with coronavirus, and as the doctor said, one child is in an intensive care unit as the child has an accompanying disease. The pediatrician assured that this virus is usually relatively light in children, but the cases of infection have increased among children as well. “Of course, the delta strain of Covid has increased the incidence of the virus as the infectivity rate of this strain is high, and for example, from March last year to July this year, 4-4.5% of those tested positive in the total PCR test were children, and in the case of delta strain, the percent of children among those confirmed in September was 5.5%. Fortunately, against the background of the increase in general cases, the hospital cases did not reach very critical numbers. And although we have one child in intensive care, in general, the positive cases have increased, but in a more severe process, we have not had dramatic cases, “says Sergey Sargsyan.
Does COVID also have health effects in children? For example, “long COVID” is often mentioned where, even after recovery, a person has some health problems – a cough, a long time to recover from the loss of taste, etc. The pediatrician explained that COVID probably lowers immunity a bit, but it is incomparable with adults in terms of consequences, and the consequences are incomparable in the case of acute respiratory diseases. “We do not see “long COVID” in children, but we have a multisystem disease. It is an inflammatory disease. It manifests itself like Kawasaki disease – fever, pain, changes in the abdomen and heart, which occurs about 4 weeks after COVID. Most of these cases were in autumn and winter, as well as in spring, but now the delta strain does not seem to cause such a thing, and we rarely have these types of cases.” The doctor said that at the moment, there is an increase in acute respiratory viruses, of course. On the one hand, it is the appropriate season, but on the other hand, there is another reason.
According to Sergey Sargsyan, the increase in acute respiratory diseases is conditioned by the fact that in the last 1.5 years the children were “isolated.” “In other words, the diseases that should have been normal and, say, from March last year to this spring, should have made the children sick, did not happen because they were quarantined. Children did not go to school and preschool, and the normal epidemiological links among children were cut. This phenomenon is seen all over the world.” So, as the doctor said, the rate of COVID among children is not as high as other respiratory diseases.
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Nelly BABAYAN
