Study: Black, Hispanic children disproportionately catch COVID

NEW HAVEN — Black children and Hispanic children came down with COVID-19 at such a greater rate than their white counterparts at eight hospitals in the Northeast that it was almost like the populations were dealing with “two different diseases,” Yale researchers said of looking at the data.

Researchers analyzed a sample of

281 pediatric patients across eight hospitals in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, finding that “three out of four children hospitalized with severe cases of COVID-19 were Black or Hispanic” (23.3 percent were Black children and 51 percent were Hispanic children), according to a statement about the study from Yale University.

Further, most of the hospitals surveyed — which “serve diverse sociodemographic populations — with many having a predominantly non-Hispanic white population” also reported that the “majority of patients diagnosed with the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 were Hispanic and/or Black,” researchers said.

By comparison, across the country, 38 percent of hospitalized adults

65 or older came from those demographic groups, researchers said.

According to the statement on the Northeast hospitals surveyed about pediatric patients, the majority of “patients presenting with severe respiratory issues were Hispanic teenagers with underlying health issues,” while “nearly all of the youths presenting with multisystem inflammatory syndrome (MIS-C) — which appears two to four weeks after COVID-19 infection — were 7 to

9 years old and had no preexisting conditions.”

“It was not what we expected,” said lead author Carlos Oliveira, assistant professor of pediatrics (infectious disease) and director of congenital infectious diseases at Yale New Haven Children’s Hospital.

“It was almost like two different diseases,” Oliveira said in the statement from the university. “We have a lot more work to do to untangle race and ethnicity from socioeconomic factors.”

According to the release, among the 281 patients in the study, 143 presented with respiratory symptoms, while 69 had MIS-C.

Sixty-nine youths also were diagnosed with another acute SARS

CoV-2-related clinical syndrome or condition, such as gastrointestinal symptoms or neurological disease, researchers found, according to Yale.

Children presenting with MIS-C rarely have respiratory symptoms, Oliveira said in the release, but instead tend to have diarrhea and vomiting that become increasingly worse over time, along with fevers, rash and red eyes.

In contrast, those with severe respiratory COVID-19 usually are older adolescents, Oliveira said, and often have preexisting conditions such as obesity and asthma.

“Many of these youths are likely getting COVID-19 from parents who are considered essential workers,” Oliveira said in the release.

“The first COVID-19 patient I took care of was a Hispanic teenager with respiratory disease,” he said. “As we were about to intubate him, we learned that his father, who was in his late 30s, was placed on a ventilator a few hours prior, and his mother was just beginning to show signs of COVID-19.”

According to Oliveira, about 40 children have been hospitalized with COVID at YNHH. About one-third of them ended up in the intensive care unit; nearly all recovered and were discharged.

The findings appear in the Nov. 13 online edition of the Journal of Pediatrics.