COVID AND THE VACCINE - TRUTH, LIES, AND MISCONCEPTIONS REVEALED, page-2571

A leading Brazil epidemiologist says Covid is causing severe muscle aches, diarrhoea, coughing, abdominal pain, hospitalisation and even death – and all among children. Photograph: Bruno Kelly/Reuters.

Emergency physician and leading epidemiologist in Brazil, Dr Fatima Marinho, is seeing symptoms of Covid-19 in children that starkly contrast with the message that has been relayed globally throughout the pandemic that children do not appear to suffer severely from the virus.

Severe muscle aches, diarrhoea, coughing, abdominal pain and hospitalisation – all of these are happening to children with Covid-19 in Brazil, Marinho says.

The latest available data extracted by Marinho on 15 April showed 2,216 children aged between zero and nine had died from Covid-19. This includes 1,397 babies under one year old. Meanwhile, more than 67,000 children in the zero-to-nine years old age group have been hospitalised in Brazil.

Marinho, a senior adviser to the global public health organisation Vital Strategies, tells Guardian Australia: “The epidemic in Brazil is changing the profile of severe cases.”

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“We see more young people hospitalised and dying by Covid compared to 2020,” she says. “Soon Brazil must start to vaccinate young people because of the risk due to new variants. But there isn’t enough vaccine.”