![\"\"](\"http:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/05\/Screen-Shot-2020-05-18-at-10.47.03-AM.png\")
Jack McMorrow, 14, was hospitalized for heart failure from a severe inflammatory syndrome linked to the coronavirus.\u00a0 Credit: Gabriela Bhaskar for The New York Times<\/p><\/div>\n
When a sprinkling of a reddish rash appeared on Jack McMorrow\u2019s hands in mid-April, his father figured the 14-year-old was overusing hand sanitizer \u2014 not a bad thing during a global pandemic.<\/p>\n
When Jack\u2019s parents noticed that his eyes looked glossy, they attributed it to late nights of video games and TV.<\/p>\n
When he developed a stomachache and didn\u2019t want dinner, \u201cthey thought it was because I ate too many cookies or whatever,\u201d said Jack, a ninth grader in Woodside, Queens, who loves Marvel Comics and has ambitions to teach himself \u201cStairway to Heaven\u201d on the guitar.<\/p>\n
But over the next 10 days, Jack felt increasingly unwell. His parents consulted his pediatricians in video appointments and took him to a weekend urgent care clinic. Then, one morning, he awoke unable to move.<\/p>\n
He had a tennis-ball-size lymph node, raging fever, racing heartbeat and dangerously low blood pressure. Pain deluged his body in \u201ca throbbing, stinging rush,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou could feel it going through your veins and it was almost like someone injected you with straight-up fire,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Jack, who was previously healthy, was hospitalized with heart failure that day, in a stark example of the newly discovered severe inflammatory syndrome linked to the coronavirus that has already been identified in about 200 children in the United States and Europe and killed several.<\/p>\n
The condition, which the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are calling\u00a0Multisystem Inflammatory Syndrome in Children<\/a>, has shaken widespread confidence that children were largely spared from the pandemic. Instead of targeting lungs as the primary coronavirus infection does, it causes inflammation throughout the body and can cripple the heart. It has been compared to a rare childhood inflammatory illness called\u00a0Kawasaki disease<\/a>, but doctors have learned that the new syndrome affects the heart differently and erupts mostly in school-age children, rather than infants and toddlers. The syndrome often appears weeks after infection in children who did not experience first-phase coronavirus symptoms.At a Senate hearing last week, Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, a leader of the government\u2019s coronavirus response, warned that because of the syndrome, \u201cwe\u2019ve got to be careful that we are not cavalier and thinking that children are completely immune to the deleterious effects.\u201d<\/p>\n