Copypasta After 3 Children Die, a Race to Investigate a Baffling Virus Syndrome The New York Times	 Joseph Goldstein and Jesse McKinley ,The New York Times•May 23, 2020 Scroll back up to restore default view. NEW YORK — Blood will be collected from dozens of children in New York to determine whether they share any genetic variations that might make them susceptible to a mysterious syndrome linked to the coronavirus. Tissue samples from at least one of the three patients to have died from it — ages 5, 7 and 18 — have been sent to a public health laboratory for intensive testing. A team of more than 30 disease detectives — epidemiologists, clinicians and statisticians — is poring over thousands of pages of medical records. Even as doctors and scientists around the world race to develop treatments and vaccines for COVID-19, New York state has become the center of a parallel effort to investigate an unnerving aspect of the outbreak: an illness that is sickening a small but growing number of children. The ailment has now been reported in at least 161 children in New York, making the state’s caseload one of the largest publicly reported anywhere. Hundreds of other children across the United States and in Europe have also been sickened with the illness, now called multisystem inflammatory syndrome. The syndrome can be characterized by severe inflammation of the heart, blood vessels, the gastrointestinal tract or other organs, believed to be caused by a reaction to the coronavirus. The inquiries into why it is occurring and whether a treatment can be found could have an impact on how authorities handle the reopening of schools and other activities for children. Doctors in New York involved in the effort say that not since health officials began investigating the connection between Zika in pregnant women and microcephaly in 2015 and 2016 has there been such an urgent search to understand a mysterious threat to children. “We’re looking at everything possible — therapies, diagnostics, clinical picture — and we’re trying to pull this all together,” said Dr. Howard Zucker, the state health commissioner. He added, “It does keep you up at night. It’s the worry that, is there something we’re going to figure out in six months from now, and we’re going to say, ‘How did we not think about that possible therapy? How did we not figure out that this would have helped?’”