De Blasio describes 15 cases in children of mysterious disease that could be related to coronavirus
At his daily press conference, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio warned parents to be on the lookout for a set of symptoms in children that could be related to COVID-19.
Video Transcript
BILL DE BLASIO: I'm going to go to a matter that really deserves attention. And I want to tell you what happened here just in the last few days. And if you're a parent, I want you to listen carefully in particular. I made it a point, since we're all in this together in this city, we're all working together to protect people, when something is raised by our colleagues in the media that points out something we all need to know about or something that needs to be addressed, I'm trying to remember to say thank you-- so I want to thank Melissa Russo who raised an important issue about a problem we're starting to see. And we take it very seriously.
And in general, we know as we've dealt with the coronavirus that we have not seen the same kind of impact on young people that we see on older people, particularly much older people. But something's happened the last few days that's beginning to concern our health department. And again, parents pay attention because it does involve our children. And I say that as a parent myself. I take this seriously.
Even a few days ago, we were not seeing much incidence, but now we are. 15 cases in New York City now we've identified, and that is enough for sure to say, even though it's uncommon compared to the hundreds of thousands of people who have contracted this disease, it's still causing us concern. So this particular condition, even though it's rare, here are the symptoms. And again, this affects children-- fever, rash, abdominal pain, and vomiting.
If your children are experiencing-- any child experiencing these symptoms, particularly in combination, call your doctor right away. We want to make sure that if a child is dealing with this reality, they get the support that they need. We will have in a few minutes an opportunity to hear from our health care leaders who can explain in more detail. But again, when we see something, we want to identify it and tell the public about it.
This is something that's causing concern. I want to make sure all New Yorkers are aware. And we've put out a health alert letting health care providers know that if they see incidents of this new condition, that we want to make sure it's reported immediately to our health department, so we can identify what's going on and how extensive it is and deal with it.
