Emmanuel... our tiny Covid miracle
Parents’ joy as three-months premature baby wins desperate 37- day f ight with virus – before the date he was even due to be born
OF ALL t he many st ories of bravery amid the Covid-19 crisis, surely none is more moving that of the little boy believed to be Britain’s youngest survivor.
Finally allowed home last week after a 37-day battle with the illness, three-month-old Emmanuel Boateng is alive only thanks to the dedicated hospital care and the gamble of prescribing a drug more often used for ebola patients.
Emmanuel, from Peckham, SouthEast London, was born at just 27 weeks – three months early – on January 30 before Britain was in lockdown and spent nearly two months in hospital on a ventilator to help him breathe.
He improved enough to be able to go home but ten days later, after becoming floppy and hot, he was taken to King’s College Hospital where, just minutes from death, he was diagnosed with both coronavirus and sepsis, and was rushed into the paediatric intensive care unit.
Emmanuel’s mother Evelyn, 31, who works in a care home, recalled: ‘I hadn’t wanted to take him to hospital because I thought that is where he could catch the virus. But he was getting worse and the GP told us to go.
‘In that first 24 hours, I was told to prepare for the worst three times. I was on my own in the hospital crying and just praying to God that my little boy was going to OK.’
Senior intensive care consultant Dr Pam D’Silva said it had been touch and go. ‘He was so ill, we were not sure he would survive the first few hours. There was no time to spare. If he had got to hospital just a few minutes later, or there had been any delay on our part, he would have died. I have no doubt.’
The following day, test results confirmed the doctors’ suspicions that little Emmanuel – whose name means ‘God is with us’ in Hebrew – had Covid-19.
Now his mother faced an agonising 14-day period of isolation with her husband Maphitus, 39, separated from their son.
Doctors feared Emmanuel would be too weak to fight the infection so a radical decision was taken: they would apply for him to be given the anti-viral drug Remdesivir, which is more commonly used to treat patients with ebola.
At that stage the drug was still in a trial phase, but only for adults.
Emmanuel was given the right to receive Remdesivir on compassionate grounds. And, miraculously, as he entered his third week in intensive care, he started to show signs of recovery.
After 37 days in hospital, 21 of those in intensive care, he was given the all-clear and was finally discharged on May 8 – the day he had been due to be born.
Dozens of doctors, nurses and support staff lined the corridor to ‘clap him out’ in an emotional farewell. Evelyn, who also has son Morris, four, said: ‘It’s something I will never forget.
‘There was an enormous sense of relief that this was a happy story among all the deaths at King’s.
‘ Emmanuel surviving was like a breath of fresh air.’
‘I was told to prepare for the worst three times’