12-Year-Old Girl Survives Cardiac Arrest from COVID-19 Complications

A 12-year-old girl survived a near-death experience linked to the novel coronavirus (COVID-19).

Early last month, Juliet Daly of New Orleans suffered from multi-system inflammatory syndrome in children, or MISC, which health officials now believe could be tied to the coronavirus in young kids.

The condition, according to CNN, made her lips turn blue and her limbs go cold, and her heart stopped while at the emergency room on April 6; she was revived via CPR.

Juliet went into cardiac arrest and was put on a ventilator, staying intubated for four days before being able to breathe again on her own. She was discharged from the hospital on April 15, the outlet reported.

"I really didn't understand how serious it was but I was scared," Juliet told CNN, with a doctor who treated her adding that she "was about as close to death as you can get."

The girl told WWL-TV earlier this month that she "died and came back." Now expected to make a full recovery, her mother Jennifer Daly is relieved that the frightening health scare is over.

"It was devastating,” said Jennifer. “Thank god it worked out okay because it was the worst."

Pediatric multi-system inflammatory syndrome has recently been explored by medical experts as a potential connection to COVID-19. The illness presents similarly to Kawasaki disease, a rare but treatable condition that causes inflammation in blood vessels.

It seems to affect the heart of those who may have been infected with COVID-19 but does not include the primary symptoms: coughing and shortness of breath.

Dr. John Torres, an NBC News medical correspondent, appeared on Today earlier this week to discuss the illness and what parents should be on the lookout for in children.

Symptoms include: a prolonged fever lasting more than five days, severe abdominal pain, diarrhea or vomiting, patchy blue or pale skin discoloration, trouble breathing or rapid breathing, lethargy and rapid heart rate.

Torres mentioned that children can present with this mysterious illness up to six weeks after recovering from the coronavirus. He said — though it’s early and doctors are still learning more — the death rate seems to be around 0.1 percent.

"No one's exactly sure how it relates to COVID, and they're not entirely sure all of those cases are related to COVID, but in medical parlance, we call it correlation without causation," he explained. "They think this has to do with kids' immune systems going into hyperactive overdrive, which is different than adults' systems, [which] can't get hyperactive when they have COVID."

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