Alert Issued for Child Pneumonia Outbreak Overwhelming Hospitals in China

The Program for Monitoring Emerging Diseases (ProMED), a program of the International Society for Infectious Diseases (ISID), as just issued an alert due to a surge of pneumonia cases among children in China that is overwhelming hospitals.

With the outbreak of pneumonia in China, children’s hospitals in Beijing, Liaoning and other places were overwhelmed with sick children, and schools and classes were on the verge of suspension. Parents questioned whether the authorities were covering up the epidemic.In the early morning, Beijing Children’s Hospital was still overcrowded with parents and children whose children had pneumonia and came to seek treatment. Mr. [W], a Beijing citizen: “Many, many are hospitalized. They don’t cough and have no symptoms. They just have a high temperature (fever) and many develop pulmonary nodules.”The situation in Liaoning Province is also serious. The lobby of Dalian Children’s Hospital is full of sick children receiving intravenous drips. There are also queues of patients at the traditional Chinese medicine hospitals and the central hospitals. A staff member of Dalian Central Hospital said: “Patients have to wait in line for 2 hours, and we are all in the emergency department and there are no general outpatient clinics.”Some school classes have even been canceled completely. Not only are all students sick, but teachers are also infected with pneumonia.

Legal Insurrection readers will recall that the US really became aware of the emerging COVID-19 pandemic when reports of a mysterious “pneumonia-like illness” reportedly slammed hospitals in Wuhan, China. It was a ProMed notification back in December 2019 that brought COVID-19 to the attention of the world.

Infectious disease experts and epidemiologists are quite concerned, especially as China has been less than forthcoming with information on infectious diseases spreading through the nation in recent years.

Dr Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist and director of the Pandemic Center at Brown University School of Public Health, told DailyMail.com the news was ‘alarming’.She said we should ‘hold all countries to that same standard’, referencing China’s history of covering up new outbreaks, which happened in 2003 with the original SARS and in 2019 with Covid.Dr Krutika Kuppalli, an infectious disease physician who is part of the WHO’s Health Emergencies Program, said testing and making those results public was crucial, adding in a post on X that the illness ‘could be anything’.Dr Neil Stone, an infectious diseases specialist doctor at the University College Hospital in London, wrote on the platform formerly known as Twitter: ‘The last time I saw reports of an outbreak of undiagnosed pneumonia in China thought, naa…no big deal. [It] won’t amount to much.’That was in December 2019. Not making that same mistake again.’

It must be noted that there are some theories centering around known viruses being the cause of the current surge of disease. Furthermore, China was among the last to end a very long period of “social distancing” and pandemic restrictions. Such isolation is thought to weaken immune systems, especially among children.

…[T]he outbreak could be linked to Mycoplasma pneumoniae, also known as “walking pneumonia”, which is reportedly surging as China enters its first winter without its stringent Covid-19 lockdown in place.Other countries, including the UK and US, saw similar surges in diseases such as RSV and flu once pandemic restrictions were lifted, as years of suppressed circulation hit immunity among the population.Symptoms of walking pneumonia – which generally affects young children – include a sore throat, fatigue, and a lingering cough that can last for weeks or months. In severe cases, this can eventually deteriorate into pneumonia.

In fact, reports from Chinese authorities assert the disease that is spreading is, indeed, walking pneumonia:

Before any government bureaucrat decides to Fauci the nation over this latest disease, I will note that the pandemic policies were spectacular failures resulting in societal-level, generational-wide damage. The best approach for everyone right now is to reduce your risk factors when it comes to exposure to airborne pathogens of any kind:

Tags: China, Medicine, Science

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