SOMETIME IN FEBRUARY or early March a six-month-old girl was admitted to a hospital in the Stanford area of California. She had a fever, a blotchy rash, mild congestion and cracked lips, and was refusing to eat. Her doctors diagnosed Kawasaki disease, a rare paediatric illness originally identified in Japan in 1967. Kawasaki disease is poorly understood, but is suspected to be the result of an over-reaction by the immune system to some as-yet-unidentified stimulus-which some past evidence suggests may be a corona-virus. If untreated (which is usually a result of misdiagnosis, precisely because it is so rare), it can result in potentially lethal cardiac complications. Recognise it in time to treat it, though, and patients normally recover. And in this case it was recognised, and the patient was treated appropriately. Moreover, as part of that treatment-because, although she had no respiratory problems she did have a fever-her doctors screened her for covid-19. The tests came back positive.
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