New ailment hits minority kids harder

Most of the city children sickened by a mysterious, potentially deadly condition linked to coronavirus are black and Hispanic, preliminary data released Friday shows.

The city has detected 110 cases of “pediatric multi-system inflammatory syndrome” in children as of Friday – up by 58 since Tuesday. A 5-year-old boy has died of the condition in the city already.

Twenty-four percent of them are black, 14% are Hispanic, 10% are Asian and 9% are white, according to incomplete and preliminary data shared by Mayor de Blasio Friday. The race was unknown for 38% of those cases, so the demographic breakdown may change.

Black and Hispanic New Yorkers also account for the most reported deaths from coronavirus in the city.

De Blasio said the initial findings were “sobering.”

“I’m very much concerned that this looks like it’s tracking the same disparities we’ve seen throughout this crisis and that is something we have to address very, very aggressively with everything we’ve got,” he said during a remote briefing.

The city said 54% of kids in the city found with the syndrome tested positive for coronavirus or were found to have antibodies suggesting they were infected and recovered from COVID-19.

Health officials are scrambling to better understand the new syndrome, though they’ve acknowledged they don’t know why kids are susceptible to it, how long the condition takes to manifest or the likelihood of developing it. The city said doctors should be called if children have symptoms including persistent fever, very red eyes, swollen limbs, rashes, abdominal pain, vomiting or diarrhea.

Some of the detected cases, 35%, were in children under 4 years old, preliminary data show. A quarter of the case include kids from 5 to 9 years old, 24% were in those aged 10 to 14 and 16% were in young adults from 15 to 21.

The city said 57% of the children with the syndrome are male and 43% are female.