“We held our breath for that four to eight weeks after the surge, saying, ‘OK, get ready, here comes MIS-C,'” Buddy Creech, MD, a pediatric infectious disease expert at Nashville, Tenn.-based Vanderbilt University Medical Center, told NBC News. “It just never materialized.”
MIS-C cases spiked after the U.S. experienced COVID-19 surges in spring 2020 and last winter. While the delta variant’s emergence drove pediatric infections to record levels this summer, “there are fewer [MIS-C] cases than we would expect,” Roberta DeBiasi, MD, chief of infectious diseases at Children’s National Hospital in Washington, D.C., told NBC News.
Children’s National treated about 60 MIS-C patients after the first wave, 100 after the second wave and just 40 after the latest surge, according to Dr. DeBiasi. She said vaccination trends may play a role, as delta became dominant when a lot of children were getting inoculated. Dr. Creech also suggested that lower MIS-C rates may be linked to the delta variant’s specific tendencies.
Overall, cases of MIS-C are rare. As of Nov. 30, there have been 5,973 cases and 52 deaths in the U.S., CDC data shows.
