696 children with COVID-19 in hospitals, one in intensive care, Ministry of Health reports

January 31, BPN. 696 children with COVID-19 are hospitalized, one child is in intensive care, Alena Kratkova, First Deputy Health Minister said at a press conference in Minsk on January 31.

On January 28, three children with COVID-19 were in intensive care. On January 31, two of them were transferred to regular wards. None of them were on ventilator, according to the Health Ministry.

Coronavirus infection in children is not serious, said Aksana Ramanava, chief external specialist in children’s infectious diseases at the Ministry of Health. She urged parents not to go to policlinics if they did not need a sick note for their child. During the COVID-19 epidemic, schoolchildren and students may remain out of school for five days without a certificate in case of an acute respiratory infection.

“The main thing is to monitor the fever. As a rule, the fever lasts for two or three days, and then the temperature drops,” Ramanava said.

She noted that the most severe complication of coronavirus in children was a “multisystem inflammatory syndrome”, affecting the cardiovascular, respiratory and gastrointestinal tracts, kidneys, liver and other organs and systems. Symptoms include fever, rash, swollen lymph nodes, swelling, heart or abdominal pain and lethargy. The syndrome can develop even weeks after recovery.

Ramanava did not say how many children were diagnosed with this syndrome. At the same time, she noted that according to foreign experts, the number of cases of this rare complication was not increasing.

The doctor urged parents and children to comply with the sanitary and epidemiological regime and to vaccinate against COVID-19. As of January 27, over 30.2 thousand minors aged 12-17 years received one vaccine dose, while more than 1.9 thousand have been fully vaccinated.

In total, more than 5,298,000 people in Belarus have received at least one dose of COVID-19 vaccine, of which over 4,417,000 have been fully vaccinated (47.3% of the population).