Two babies diagnosed with infection
TWO babies were diagnosed with coronavirus yesterday amid a record surge in new cases across the UK.
Officials revealed that a newborn baby had tested positive at a hospital in Norfolk as the number of people diagnosed with the virus surged by 676.
A nine-month-old child also fell ill with the virus, even though his parents displayed no symptoms.
Myroslava and Callum Coates, from Manchester, said their son Cassian was diagnosed with Covid-19 when they visited a GP believing he was suffering from a chest infection.
Mrs Coates described how the family were told to sit in a room marked ‘suspected case’ as Cassian was examined.
The family was left baffled when the doctor eventually confirmed the youngster was carrying the virus, despite displaying only mild symptoms.
Mrs Coates said: ‘We weren’t expecting that. Cassian had a fever and cold but not the cough and symptoms everyone was talking about.
‘We wondered where he caught it because my husband and I are fine.’ Though ‘panicked’ initially, the family was told to self-isolate at home and to treat Cassian’s illness with Calpol, raising a further alarm if his temperature did not decrease after ten days.
Mrs Coates said guidelines about how to respond when dealing with a suspected case were not ‘clear enough’.
She added: ‘You’re told “don’t go to your GP, don’t go to hospital unless you’re really sick”, so there’s a gap.
‘You just see death rates and things being shut down in that scary way. There are reports, there’s media but we don’t know what’s real and what’s not.’
While children are susceptible to the virus, it is much more unlikely that they will experience serious illness or die.
In China, where the pandemic originated, just 2.4 per cent of cases involved under-18s, with symptoms among children generally milder than in adults. Yesterday, UK authorities revealed another 676 confirmed cases in just 24 hours, taking the total to 2,626.
A newborn was among three new cases identified at the James Paget University Hospital in Great Yarmouth, Norfolk.
All of the patients were being treated in isolation yesterday as an extensive ‘contact tracing’ exercise was carried out by Public Health England to find those they may have had contact with.
It comes after another new baby tested positive last weekend, days after the child’s mother was taken to a north London hospital with suspected pneumonia. She later tested positive.
Symptoms vary in severity. Mandy Charlton, 46, from Newcastle, said the bug left her feeling like her body was on fire and she ‘had swallowed glass’.