About Damn Time ...

... this plague stopped w/ the ageism & got to work on the yout'.

And then you turn to this New York Times story and the syndrome starts to seem really alarming.

When a sprinkling of a reddish rash appeared on Jack McMorrow’s hands in mid-April, his father figured the 14-year-old was overusing hand sanitizer....

When Jack’s parents noticed that his eyes looked glossy, they attributed it to late nights of video games and TV.

When he developed a stomachache and didn’t want dinner, “they thought it was because I ate too many cookies or whatever,” said Jack, a ninth grader in Woodside, Queens....

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.

He had a tennis-ball-size lymph node, raging fever, racing heartbeat and dangerously low blood pressure. Pain deluged his body in “a throbbing, stinging rush,” he said.

“You could feel it going through your veins and it was almost like someone injected you with straight-up fire,” he said.

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.

Jack's illness was not mild:

Jack arrived at the children’s hospital so feverish that his father was “washing me down with ice-cold water and it only felt like a tingle,” he said.

His resting heart rate was 165 beats per minute, about twice as high as normal, as his heart struggled to compensate for his alarmingly low blood pressure, which was hampering its ability to circulate blood and supply his vital organs with oxygen and nutrients.

This condition is a form of heart failure called cardiogenic shock, and Jack’s was “pretty severe,” said Dr. Steven Kernie, chief of pediatric critical care medicine at the hospital and Columbia University.

... blood vessels throughout his body were inflamed, a condition called vasculitis, so the vessels’ muscles were “not controlling blood flow as well as they should,” Dr. Kernie said.

Doctors also suspected that the heart was inflamed, known as myocarditis, which in untreated serious cases can cause lasting damage.

Jack nearly died. Three young New Yorkers already have died from this.

Equal Morbidity Opportunity, I say.