He is the youngest death from coronavirus in France. This Friday evening, Jérôme Salomon announced that among the 554 new hospital deaths in France, figure "a child under ten years", who died in an infant resuscitation department of a Parisian hospital.
If the Director General of Health gave no further details, he said that the death of this child was "multiple". He had "significant comorbidities", according to the Ile-de-France Regional Health Agency. Friday evening, this announcement already aroused a lot of emotion. After Julie, a 16-year-old girl from Essonne who died of illness in late March, he is the second minor patient to die in France.
"I understand that this causes anxiety and asks a lot of questions to parents, but the death of a child tested positive for coronavirus remains of the order of the hyper-exceptional. There are always multiple causes: another infection, another illness… ”, deciphers Professor Isabelle Desguerre, head of the neuropediatrics department at the Parisian hospital Necker.
“It is not the rule at all. There are very few children and adolescents in intensive care, and very very few die, here as elsewhere in the world ", agrees his colleague, head of the pediatric resuscitation service at Robert Debré hospital, in Paris, Stéphane Dauger. In fact, minors only very rarely appear in the disastrous world accounts but always attract a lot of attention. A week ago, the United Kingdom mourned the death of a five-year-old boy. A few days before, the United States announced the disappearance linked to Covid-19 of a six-week-old baby in Connecticut.
A study launched on Tuesday
"I can assure you that these cases are exceptional and do not reflect our everyday reality," says Robert Cohen, pediatric infectious disease specialist at the Créteil hospital (Val-de-Marne). This professor announces us at the same time that the French Pediatric Society, of which he chairs the Group of pediatric infectious pathologies (GPIP) launches this Tuesday a clinical study on children and the coronavirus. It will cover 600 pups. "They will be tested by city pediatricians to assess how many are carriers of the disease. This study will last a month and will be very instructive, ”he deciphers.
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At the same time, an Observatory of all pediatric hospitalized cases is set up. "It is a question of studying the symptoms and the clinical course of these children in the hospital", he continues, while specifying that hospitalizations are few and last, in the majority of cases, only "two at three days ". "Even if there are very harsh situations like this death, the coronavirus problem is not young patients but adults. "
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On the other hand, the professor is worried about two other consequences of the virus: "parents are afraid to take their children to the hospital, we are facing late appendicitis, diabetes detected late ...". And also the vaccination of the little ones: “the vaccination program is very worrying. Vaccination is essential ”, he recalls.