Children Are Covid-19 Long-Haulers, Too
Some children infected with Covid-19 experience debilitating symptoms months later. Parents struggle to find out why.
When 12-year-old Samantha got sick back in February 2020, her family believed it was a stomach bug. The healthy Los Angeles student so rarely got ill that her mother, Jamie Coker-Robertson, didn’t think much of her early symptoms. It was clear a virus was spreading through Samantha’s classroom, but most parents shrugged it off as a typical illness any child could expect to pick up at school in the winter months, such as a cold or flu.
Then, students began to “drop like flies,” says Coker-Robertson. “Half of her class was out for a week at a time.”
In previous flu seasons, students would return to school after two to three days. But this time Coker-Robertson noticed that it would take one to two weeks for kids to recover, sometimes longer. “None of them had the same symptoms,” Coker-Robertson says. “Nobody could really figure out what was going on.”
Samantha’s symptoms started with dizziness and lightheadedness. Then she lost her appetite and developed nausea. For almost a week she was bed-ridden. “I just started crying,” Coker-Robertson recalls. “I was like, ‘Is my kid dying?’”
