Lancet 395, 1771–1778 (2020)

Cell https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2020.09.016 (2020)

Children and young adults usually experience a mild form of COVID-19. However, in May, medical doctors in Bergamo, Italy, the city hardest hit by COVID-19, reported a cluster of children with features of the pediatric vascular inflammatory syndrome Kawasaki disease. The absolute number of cases was small — 10 children in a region that had, at that point, seen more than 130,000 cases of COVID-19 — but it represented a 30-fold increase in the local incidence of Kawasaki disease.

The authors noted that five of the ten patients had an acute form of the disease: Kawasaki disease shock syndrome. Affected children were also on average older than the normal age for the diagnosis of Kawasaki disease and showed more cardiovascular involvement. A rare but serious pediatric complication of COVID-19, multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children, has since been described.