Does My Child Have COVID-19 Or Is It Just A Cold?

In this blog post, we will discuss how to diagnose your kid’s symptoms and recommend when to self-isolate and get a covid test.

Your child is prone to catch a fever, cough or runny nose during the fall and winter. Probably even all three. It’s inevitable!

Before now, that would probably not have been a big deal. Typically kids are allowed to continue school as soon as they recover and are well enough to resume. However, parents can not help but wonder. Are these symptoms the sign of coronavirus? Should my child self-isolate? Does he need to go for testing? If yes, how frequently? The rules may vary from school to school.

As the flu and cold season quickly approaches and the academic year already in session in several regions. Parents must know what they need to do. Thus we interviewed 3 paediatricians to know if it’s possible to determine whether your child’s symptoms might be coronavirus. And what you need to do if you feel your child has got the disease.

How will you know if it’s a cold, the flu or it’s COVID-19?

You probably won’t. It is very difficult to determine since coronavirus symptoms imitate a lot of other common childhood illnesses.

“Unfortunately, there is no single very distinguishing feature,” said Eva Cheung. Critical care specialist and M.D., a pediatric cardiologist at Columbia University Medical Center and New York-Presbyterian Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital.

The number one coronavirus symptoms in kids are a fever and a cough, or both. As reported by the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention. The medical professionals we interviewed said that they’ve usually observed congestion, diarrhoea or fever in kids who have tested positive.

Although there are several other possible ways the disease manifests itself in kids. The symptoms may also include difficulty in breathing, sore throat, headache, abdominal pain, and loss of smell or taste. Some of these symptoms are equally signs of other infections that spread in the flu and cold season.

Paediatric specialists said, “parents know their kids the most”

As one of our paediatric specialists said, “parents know their kids the most”. If you know you child usually develops allergies this period of the year, for instance. Then it’s likely okay to suggest that is what’s the cause of his runny nose. However, if your child’s symptoms seem to be unusual, it’s advisable to call your child’s paediatrician.

Several infected kids won’t show any symptoms. A multicentre survey of over 400 hospitalised kids in France showed that 45% of the 22 kids who tested positive for the virus responsible for COVID-19. SARS-CoV-2, manifested none of the symptoms commonly linked with coronavirus. This provides a hint as to the number of potentially asymptomatic kids. However, it’s hard to determine the percentage of children asymptomatic in the overall population. This is because we don’t know the overall number of kids who have contracted coronavirus – a lot of them may have never undergone covid test.

Although it can be challenging for parents to differentiate coronavirus symptoms from the typical flu or cold, the coronavirus-related multisystem inflammatory syndrome, now called MIS-C, has better distinguishable characteristics and symptoms. The illness, which affects kids, is often characterised by a red rash; a fever of 101 or above that doesn’t decrease. And abdominal discomfort alongside vomiting and diarrhoea. The syndrome is, however, quite uncommon.

At what stage should you keep your child home and away from school?

Keep your child at home if she has a fever. Even before the COVID-19 outbreak, most schools demanded that kids with fevers be kept at home and not attend school until the fever had decreased for a minimum of 24 hours.

Before COVID-19, children would usually go to class with coughs and lingering runny nose because cold symptoms can sometimes persist for weeks. It was neither expected nor practical for parents, in most academic settings, to retain their kids at home for 3 weeks if their children didn’t have a fever and felt well enough to resume school.

However, this academic year is an exception, experts say.

This is not the time to be taking your sick child to school, even a tiny bit, or with slight symptoms, which we know is absurd. In some cases, minor symptoms can be enough to do damage and children are very good at spreading the virus, even if they are asymptomatic. And hence we are concerned about transmission from children who have mild symptoms within their school.

The symptoms that necessitate staying at home are abdominal pain, diarrhoea, vomiting, sneezing, runny nose, or coughing regardless of whether your kid has a fever.

In terms of the disease’s progression, we really can’t say whether or not the fever usually comes first or develops after.

Should I take my child for an antibody test?

Antibody tests are mostly used for studies of large populations to obtain an approximate figure of the number of individuals who have contracted the virus, not for individual diagnoses. The antibody test is not useful to parents hoping to know about their child’s ability to spread the disease. And, just as with adults, even if your child tests positive for the antibody test, it’s uncertain for how long that immunity will be or how durable the antibodies are.

Doctors can, however, use the test to detect MIS-C, or multisystem inflammatory syndrome, in a child. Recent guidelines state that physicians should perform both an antibody test and a COVID-19 test for MIS-C on kids showing MIS-C signs because we can not say how long after the original infection, the inflammatory syndrome starts.

When and how frequently should you endeavour to get your child tested for COVID-19?

This is determined by different factors such as your school’s requirements, the rate of COVID-19 in your community, and how easily and quickly you can get your child a private covid test London.

Suppose your child is suffering a fever alongside other COVID-19 symptoms like abdominal pain, a runny nose or cough. In that case, you must place a call through to your paediatrician and examine the practicality of getting testing. One major significance of the tests is to guide policymakers in determining how safe or risky it is for schools to be open and that also effects the mental health.