As we evolve the updates and upgrades to our Abled®com Networks, our awareness of the often conflicting, confusing and sometimes false information spiraling out of control from the coronavirus pandemic prompted us to create a consolidated and curated COVID-19 information hub.

Our mission is to inspire everyone to live a more Abled® life by producing content, products, services and technology that enable better, self-informed life choices along the way.

At no time has it been more important to be self-informed than now, for ourselves, our family, friends and colleagues, as we are all being faced with potentially life-changing decisions to make during this crisis.

Our Abled®ALERT Network is evolving in real time and we hope you find the impartial information and videos we’re curating, via our non-profit journalism,  helpful.

Note: Because of the frequency of use throughout all our content, in some places we have truncated COVID-19 to C19 for brevity.

We also appreciate your patience if you encounter any of our “Content in Production” placeholders as we work under reduced circumstances through these challenging times.

 

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Case reports are coming in from around the world as more children develop what may be a COVID-19 related illness that shows symptoms common in Kawasaki Disease and Toxic Shock syndrome.

Three children have died of the illness (test results are awaited from 2 others who died last weekend) in New York State and a total of 73 110 cases have been reported so far.

Doctors in Montreal are studying 20 cases in Canadian children, and scientists are examining a similar number of cases in the U.K., as well as earlier cases in Italy and Spain.

The children are not suffering the respiratory distress that many adult patients develop. They are being ravaged by the so-called “cytokine storm” – the over-reaction of the body’s immune system and it’s triggering a “multi-system inflammatory state” that attacks multiple organs, weakens blood vessels and the lining of the heart.

In all cases, the children have tested positive for SARS CoVid-2 antibodies.

Most of them are toddlers to elementary school age, however a previously healthy 14 year-old boy in the U.K. died of a stroke after being admitted to hospital. And at least seven other cases at the hospital where he was treated involved children who were clinically obese and from minority ethnic backgrounds.

UPDATE: We’ve made this our Featured Story on our Abled.Health page, with more updated information, including an exclusive report from the MailOnline about a UK study that has confirmed the condition, now being called Pediatric Inflammatory Multisystem Syndrome (PIMS-TS), IS triggered by COVID-19 infection.

 

WHAT TO WATCH FOR:

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo released the following advisory for parents:

Remain Vigilant. Seek care immediately if your child has:

*Prolonged fever (more than 5 days)

*Difficulty feeding (infants) or is too sick to drink fluids

*Severe abdominal pain, diarrhea or vomiting

*Change in skin color – becoming pale, patchy and/or blue

*Trouble breathing or is breathing very quickly

*Racing heart or chest pain

*Decreased amount or frequency of urine

*Lethargy, irritability or confusion

In the cases in the U.K., all the children had unrelenting fever, rash, vomiting, diarrhea and generalized extremity pain. And there are additional symptoms more specific to Kawasaki disease or Toxic Shock Syndrome that may present, including bloodshot eyes, red hands and feet that were also swollen, a large body rash, swollen lymph nodes in the neck, a “strawberry tongue” and red, cracked lips.

Hospitals are now reporting cases to their respective health departments, and as Governor Cuomo said, “This is the last thing we need at this time.”

For more information about Kawasaki disease you can check out the Kawasaki Disease Foundation and the Kawasaki Kids Foundation.

 

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Hydroxychloroquine was first developed to treat malaria and was later approved to treat autoimmune diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis and lupus.

After seeing a tv report about a politician who beat an almost fatal COVID-19 infection after being administered the drug, , President Donald Trump became its biggest proponent.

However, the World Health Organization (WHO) has just suspended the hydroxychloroquine arm of its Solidarity trial which is examining the efficacy and safety of four potential drugs to fight the SARS CoV-2 coronavirus and the COVID-19 disease it triggers in the body.

Citing a study published the previous Friday in The Lancet, the WHO said the initial results of the study showed higher mortality rates among COVID-19 patients who were administered the drug.

The decision was announced a day after President Trump announced he had finished a two-week preventative course of the drug combined with a daily zinc supplement.

The study published in The Lancet looked at more than 96,000 people hospitalized with COVID-19, including those treated with hydroxychloroquine or its analog chloroquine.

Researchers didn’t find any benefit for those patients.

The did find that patients had a higher risk of death and heart arrhythmia (abnormal heart rhythm) than patients who did not receive the drug.

The authors suggested that hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine should not be used to treat COVID-19 outside of clinical trials until studies confirm their safety and efficacy in such patients. 

It’s not clear if the study used hydroxychloroquine in combination with zinc.

In our C19 Video Logs tabs section, under C19 Treatment Updates, Dr. Anthony Cardillo, an ER Specialist and CEO of MEND Urgent Care in Los Angeles, explained to ABC7 news how he was seeing significant success using hydroxychloroquine in combination with zinc and explained the “one-two punch of the combo, with the zinc messing up the SARS CoV-2 virus’ ability to replicate itself.

 

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The Health and Economic Recovery Omnibus Emergency Solutions (HEROES) Act passed the U.S. House of Representatives before the Memorial Day holiday weekend.

But it won’t include the monthly checks of $2,000 and up until three months after the pandemic ends that was part of the Democrats’ proposal in the Senate.

The HEROES Act includes another round of one-time, $1,200 stimulus checks, and vows to increase the maximum stimulus amount paid to households with dependent children to $6,000.

The $3 trillion dollar cost means that efforts to get it through the Republican-controlled Senate are set to face stiff GOP opposition.

Indeed, the bill has been described by Republican senators as “dead on arrival” in the upper chamber, while Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, has dismissed the package as “another big laundry list of pet priorities”.

The Republican senators take the position that seems to mirror that of the President’s that reopening states for business is the best way to get the economy back on its feet.

 

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Is it a re-infection? Is it a relapse? Is it a virus mutation? Is it the result of a mistake in testing? Many questions have popped-up in the wake of those worrisome headlines out of Asia.

Anecdotal reports from separate friends in California report symptoms similar to coronavirus infection that occurred in late November/early December that went away and then re-appeared a few weeks later in January. This, without the benefit of testing to confirm or rule-out if it was the SARS-CoV2 coronavirus.

That’s because they simply didn’t know about it yet. The government in Wuhan, China didn’t confirm that health officials there were contending with dozens of cases of pneumonia from an unknown cause until December 31, and researchers in China didn’t identify the virus until January 8.

The first case in the U.S. wasn’t identified until January 21 in a man from Washington State who developed symptoms after returning from a trip to the Wuhan region.

It’s also a virus that impacts different people in different ways – some have mild symptoms for a day or two, while others are flat on their backs, out of commission for a week or two. And some who don’t show any symptoms or ill effects have tested positive, meaning that, until that test, they can be invisible “super-spreaders”.

In either scenario, the prevailing wisdom is that the body would be building antibodies to the infection within a week to 10 days after infection. A number of infectious disease experts say testing positive after what seemed like a recovery could be the result of a false negative and that the patient is still infected.

Residual RNA from the virus could be another source of a positive test result, post-recovery, and it’s also possible the virus becomes latent elsewhere in the body after a high immune response, only to rise again “when the coast seems clear.”

We’re still relatively early into this pandemic, and as more time goes by, researchers will hopefully be able to compile more definitive data. 

Hillary Leung has examined this in more detail at Time.com, including the data results from Shenzhen, China where almost 15% of coronavirus patients tested positive after they were discharged.

 

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With every new diagnosis of COVID-19 disease caused by the new SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, doctors are accumulating more knowledge that raises more troubling questions.

One of them is: “Should every coronavirus patient be tested for high blood levels of troponin to see if the virus has attacked the heart?” 

That’s a question New York Times science and medicine reporter Gina Kolata raises in documenting the case of a 64 year-old patient rushed to a Brooklyn hospital with all the signs of a serious heart attack, including high levels of a protein called troponin, and an “ominous heart rhythm”.

Yet in surgery, doctors didn’t find any blocked arteries. They concluded it wasn’t a heart attack. It was coronavirus.

That conclusion appears to concur with similar cases in China and Italy documented in the  Journal of American Medicine Cardiology (JAMA Cardiology), with a study lead at Wuhan University saying they found 20% of COVID-19 patients had some evidence of heart damage.

The resulting question is whether that damage is caused by the virus itself, or the body’s immune response to it? When bacteria or viruses invade the body, our immune system cells “spray the battlefield” with cytokines, a family of molecular messengers that have various functions. If the response gets out of control and turns into a flood – the aforementioned “cytokine storm” – the resulting inflammation and potential for blood clots damages the lungs and the heart.

Damaged lungs can increase the risk for arrhythmias. Some COVID-19 patients have reported a rapid heartbeat that felt like it was going to “beat out of their chest”.

The Wuhan study found that the risk of death was over four times higher among COVID-19 patients with heart complications than those without. That becomes an ominous clarion for medical professionals around the world to assess the heart, as well as the lungs in treating COVID-19 infection.

 

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In this mashup of cold, flu and now allergy season, the biggest symptom a cough or sneeze may trigger is fear – fear that it’s COVID-19.

Because so much is unknown about the new coronavirus, possible symptoms are evolving as the pandemic spreads and more cases are treated by doctors.

Dr. Bruce Aylward of the World Health Organization told npr that 90% of COVID-19 patients have a high fever as an early symptom and 70% have a dry cough. “It’s not the sniffles,” he says. “It’s not a runny nose. That can be a symptom, but that’s rare.”

Spring has come early for the estimated 19 million allergy sufferers in the U.S., and with it a paranoia that their usual seasonal symptoms of red eyes, a runny nose, scratchy throat, coughs, sneeze and body aches may be the signs of the more sinister coronavirus.

Time/AP reports that Jessica Tanniehill, 39 of Adamsville, Alabama ran that gamut of symptoms and figured her seasonal allergies had started. But then they were followed by shortness of breath. She had tested positive for COVID-19, but the report points out that this “doesn’t preclude the possibility she’d had allergies as well.”

For more detailed information on differentiating symptoms between conditions, we’ve placed a “Symptoms Map” compiled by the Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America (AAFA) based on shared data from the CDC and WHO in a drop-down tab on our COVID-19 Directory page.

 

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