Toddler fights for life as Covid-19 rages among children in US

When her two-year-old started feeling sick early last week, Ms Tiffany Jackson did not think it might be Covid-19.

No one else in the family, who live in a small town in the US state of Illinois, was sick. Adrian James just had a bit of a cough. She gave him cough syrup and put a humidifier in his room.

But by Friday, he was sweaty and his breathing was laboured.

Ms Jackson, 21, took him to an emergency room in their town, Mount Vernon. Doctors and nurses there did a chest X-ray and swabbed him for Covid-19.

The child was then airlifted to Cardinal Glennon Children's Hospital in St Louis, about 130km away.

Ms Jackson followed in a car, her grandmother at the wheel. They made the usually 90 minute-drive in about an hour.

"I didn't know if he was going to make it or not," Ms Jackson said. "I was very emotional and just very upset."

Her boy is one of nearly 840,000 children under the age of four to contract Covid-19 in the United States, according to the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention.

Vaccinations have not been approved for young children, and the US is being ravaged by a surge of cases driven by the highly contagious Delta variant, which Adrian has.

By late Tuesday night, he was intubated and heavily sedated, wrapped in his baby blanket with his favourite Paw Patrol stuffed animal at hand.

Over the past couple of days, his lungs have been able to do more of the work of breathing, and it is possible that he may be removed from the ventilator.

The US crossed the milestone of 700,000 Covid-19 deaths last week, and concern is growing over the number of infections among children.

Adrian, who will be three years old next month, had developed pneumonia in his left lung.

He was trying to gulp air, with 76 breaths per minute, nearly twice the normal rate of 40, Ms Jackson said.

She does not know how her boy contracted the virus. She had Covid-19 last summer, but no one else in the family caught it at that time.

Ms Jackson is not vaccinated because she has a rare auto-immune disorder called Guillain-Barre syndrome - contracted as a result of a flu shot when she was 16. The syndrome, which is incurable, causes nervous system damage.

She hopes that Adrian's story will help people understand what it could mean to pass the virus to young children and people with vulnerable immune systems.

"I just want people to realise it is serious," she said. - REUTERS