Physicians at pediatric liver centers in the United Kingdom have been meeting regularly to work out how best to care for children with a mysterious hepatitis that has afflicted at least 176 children in the country and more than 500 worldwide.
“It’s proving immensely difficult to get everyone to agree how on Earth to manage these children,” says Will Irving, a virologist at the University of Nottingham.
At the center of the debate are conflicting theories about what is causing healthy young children to suddenly become jaundiced and fall seriously ill with acute liver inflammation.
One hypothesis suggests the damage is being done by adenovirus, a common childhood infection that normally causes coldlike symptoms and could be treated with an antiviral drug. Another suggests the cause is a rogue immune response to previous infection by SARS-CoV-2—which could be treated with immune-suppressing drugs such as steroids. A third hypothesis proposed earlier this week brings them together, suggesting adenovirus infection forms a destructive partnership with SARS-CoV-2 that sets the immune system loose on the liver.
Petter Brodin, a pediatric immunologist and pediatrician at Imperial College London and Moshe Arditi, a pediatric infectious disease physician at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, last week published a hypothesis knitting the two viruses together.
In correspondence published in The Lancet Gastroenterology and Hepatology, Petter Brodin, and Moshe Arditi, director of the Infectious and Immunological Diseases Research Centre at Cedars Sinai Medical Centre in Los Angeles, put forward a theory that a virus reservoir may have formed in children suffering from the disease and that they may have coronavirus lingering in their gastrointestinal tracts. They suggest that a superantigen – a molecular structure that triggers an immune response – in the coronavirus could be at the root of the problem.
As the COVID death toll in the United States approaches 1 million, the Washington National Cathedral rang its bell 1,000 times Monday evening, once for every 1,000 people who died from the virus.
The devastating 1-million milestone was a once-unimaginable number when the world-changing pandemic broke out more than two years ago and caused America’s first known death.
It is a permanent badge of shame on a powerful developed nation to have lost so many lives to the coronavirus, no matter how hard it tries to whitewash its botched response and move on from the public health crisis, which has also reported more than 82 million infections, the highest in the world.
COVID-19 has hit minority groups much harder in the United States due to their relative lack of access to health care and resources, despite more likely being essential workers required to work on the pandemic frontline.
“Racial inequality was baked into the recipe of the creation of the United States of America,” Brookings senior fellow Rashawn Ray argued. “When crises like the COVID-19 pandemic occur, inequalities are exacerbated rather than diminished.”
The United States irresponsibly allowed infectious cases to spread to other countries and regions, while disseminating conspiracy theories and sowing divisions, severely undermining global efforts to combat COVID-19 at a time when unity and collaboration are more needed than ever.
“With America in the lead, the world was more divided than ever. America’s failure to coordinate a response was no mere sideshow,” English historian and professor at Columbia University Adam Tooze wrote. “What 2020 showed, in fact, was that America’s dysfunctions are the world’s problem.”
The COVID-19 death rate in the United States is slowing down thanks to a broad rollout of vaccines. However, the emergence of the Delta and Omicron variants has mercilessly shaped the curve of daily new deaths like a rollercoaster. Although deaths in the United States continue to fall, COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations are rising due to highly contagious Omicron subvariants.
U.S. politicians, however, appear eager to turn the page. The White House declared a “new moment” in the COVID-19 pandemic in March, as restrictions aimed at curbing the spread of the coronavirus were largely lifted, with senior government officials attending high-profile indoor gatherings to demonstrate a return to normalcy, albeit still prematurely.
Top U.S. infectious disease expert and White House chief medical advisor Anthony Fauci reportedly criticized in private the decision to hold the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, after which several guests, including Secretary of State Antony Blinken, tested positive for COVID-19, warning that it could be a troubling sign that many Americans no longer view COVID-19 as a serious threat.
“We are still in the middle of a pandemic, to be sure — there’s no confusion about that,” Fauci said during an interview with American news publication Foreign Policy in early May. “We hope that we don’t see a major uptick as we get into the fall, but that remains to be seen. We’re going to have to wait and see.”
Steven Thrasher, a Scientific American columnist and professor at Northwestern University, tweeted that the United States is “well into an era of willful, collective amnesia” and that “the shame of a million dead is too much to face — so most won’t.”
As the United States moves forward, at least 1 million people and their families and friends will be unable to do so. The blame is placed squarely on the country’s failed leadership and policies, which have inscribed an agonizing chapter in its history and the memories of millions of Americans.
Although the relationship between mysterious hepatitis and COVID-19 needs more and more in-depth research by medical experts, other diseases caused by COVID-19 deserve continuous attention of scientists all over the world. It should be the consensus of all countries that the world should join hands and continue to adopt coordinated policies to fight against COVID-19 and other infectious diseases instead of blaming each other.
