It’s a GO. Pandemic 2.0 is underway. They are using the same Pandemic-speak as last time.
Doctors in Massachusetts are now reporting a spike in child pneumonia cases — after health officials in Ohio said there were ‘extremely high’ numbers of this disease in one of their counties amid an outbreak in China.
Dr John Kelley, from western Massachusetts, said his practice was seeing a lot of children coming in with pneumonia or suffering from a combination of RSV and other respiratory illnesses.
Health officials in Warren County, Ohio, 30 miles north of Cincinnati, said there have been 142 pediatric cases of the condition — dubbed ‘white lung syndrome’ — since August.
‘Not only is this above the county average, it also meets the Ohio Department of Health definition of an outbreak,’ the county’s health department said Wednesday.
The spread of cases has raised fears that an American outbreak of the infection that has overwhelmed hospitals China could hit this winter. Several European countries are battling similar crises.
But a source at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said that, nationally, ‘nothing is out of the ordinary’.
An ‘ongoing investigation’ is underway in Ohio into what is triggering the wave of illness, but officials do not think it is a new respiratory disease — and instead blame a mixture of several common infections all hitting at once.
Denmark is currently being hit by a surge in the same type of pneumonia that has rocked China and sparked fears of a fresh pandemic.
Danish health chiefs say rates of mycoplasma pneumoniae, a bacterial infection for which some antibiotics are useless, has reached ‘epidemic’ levels.
Beijing has pointed to the same pathogen as being partly to blame for its ‘mystery’ wave of pneumonia — characterised by a dangerous inflammation of the lungs — in children.
In a chilling echo of the earliest days of Covid, face masks and social distancing are being recommended in the secretive nation. Hazmat suit-clad workers have been videoed spraying disinfectant through schools, hallways and outdoors.
Denmark’s Statens Serum Institut (SSI) revealed rates have tripled over the past five weeks and warned more kids will be struck down this winter.
It comes just days after the Netherlands reported its own alarming spike in children battling pneumonia, with similar reports in Denmark’s neighbour Sweden.
AC