Premature baby wins desperate 47-day battle with Covid
OF ALL the many stories of bravery amid the Covid-19 crisis, surely none is more moving than that of the little boy believed to be Britain’s youngest survivor.
Finally allowed home last week after a 47day battle with the illness, three-month-old Emmanuel Boateng is alive only thanks to the gamble of prescribing a drug more often used for ebola patients.
Emmanuel, from Peckham, South-East London, was born at just 27 weeks – three months early – on January 30 before Britain was in lockdown and he 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 rushed into the paediatric intensive care unit.
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.
Emmanuel’s mother Evelyn, 31, who works in a care home, 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.’