Coronavirus: New York paediatrician warns 80% of children in the city are infected

‘I don’t mean to be rude but the numbers are totally wrong’

A New York paediatrician has warned that 80 per cent of children in the city could be infected with Covid-19.

Dr Dyan Hes, a paediatrician with Gramercy Pediatrics, in New York City, told CBSN’s Anne-Marie Green and Vladimir Duthiers that children are not getting tested for coronavirus.

The doctor said that despite many children showing symptoms for Covid-19, it is impossible for them to be tested.

“We have zero tests for children. We have zero swabs,” she said. “I’ve had patients whose parents have Covid, child has a 102.5 fever. At the beginning when we were doing this, we were sending them to the ER.

She added that “they got turned away. They were not tested because we do not have enough tests and the kids are doing well”.

A report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), published last week, found that only 1.7% of Covid-19 cases, where the person’s age was known, occurred in children under the age of 18.

Speaking on Tuesday, Dr Hes disputed those figures and said the lack of testing in children means that the real figures will be much higher than reported by the CDC.

“I don’t mean to be rude, but the numbers are totally wrong,” Dr Hes said. “I think that probably 80% of the children have coronavirus. We are not testing children.”

“I’m in New York City. I can’t get my patients tested. And we have to assume, if they are sick, they have coronavirus. Most of them, probably 80 to 90% of them, are asymptomatic. So, these numbers are so skewed.”

Dr Hes added that the statistics are not only skewed on the amount of cases, but also on the mortality rate of children who contract Covid-19.

“I think that the mortality rate is way, way less than 0.5% for children who have it because it is so prevalent. You have to remember thousands of kids die from flu a year. This is much, much less virulent in children,” she said.

Google’s dedicated coronavirus page shows that New York City has upwards of 110,425 positive cases and at least 10,367 deaths.

According to a tracking project hosted by Johns Hopkins University, the US has upwards of 610,774 people have tested positive for coronavirus. The death toll has reached at least 26,119.