Mystery pneumonia tears through schools in China with ‘many, many hospitalized’ – in eerie echo of early days of Covid

A mystery pneumonia is reportedly tearing through schools in China.

Hospitals in Beijing and 500 miles northeast in Liaoning are among those ‘overwhelmed with sick children,’ while school classes were ‘on the verge of suspension’, according to local news reports.

The children are presenting with unusual symptoms that include inflammation in the lungs and a high fever – but no cough or other symptoms usually associated with flu, RSV and other respiratory illnesses.

The alert was issued late on Tuesday via ProMed – a large, publicly available global surveillance system that monitors infectious diseases.

It was a ProMed notification back in December 2019 that brought a mystery virus, later given the name of Covid, to the attention of many doctors and scientists, including officials at the World Health Organization.

The source for the alert was a report by the Taiwanese outlet FTV News, which added that ‘parents questioned whether the authorities were covering up the epidemic.’

China was roundly criticized for covering up the original SARS epidemic in 2003 and the Covid pandemic in late 2019 – which were both novel viruses that cause pneumonia.

But the new outbreak could be related to Mycoplasma pneumoniae, also known as walking pneumonia, which is reportedly growing in China as the country goes into its first winter without strict Covid lockdowns in place.

The US and UK also saw spikes in infections like RSV and flu after pandemic rules lifted.

FTV News reported that Beijing Children’s Hospital was still overcrowded in the early morning on Wednesday.

The Beijing Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said that more than 3,500 cases of ‘respiratory infection’ had been admitted to the Beijing Children’s Hospital at the start of October, Radio Free Asia reported. 

A staff member at the Beijing Friendship Hospital pediatrics department said there is a 24-hour wait for emergency cases to be seen. 

‘They’re still dealing with calls we took yesterday,’ the worker said. ‘They haven’t even started on today’s calls yet – there are at least 1,000 people waiting in the queue ahead of you.

‘The calls coming in today won’t get seen until tomorrow… We’re taking more than 1,000 calls a day.’

According to state-run Haibao News, the Children’s Hospital of Capital Institute of Pediatrics had so many patients on Tuesday that the outpatient desk stopped accepting new patients by the afternoon. 

At that point, 628 people were waiting in line to see a doctor at the emergency department.

Elsewhere, FTV News said: ‘The situation in Liaoning Province is also grim.’

The lobby of Dalian Children’s Hospital is reportedly full of sick children receiving intravenous drips. 

There are also long queues of patients at the Traditional Chinese Medicine Hospital and the Central Hospital.

A staff member of Dalian Central Hospital said: ‘Patients have to wait in line for two hours, and we are all in the emergency department and there are no general outpatient clinics.’

Some school classes have been canceled altogether. Not only are all students sick, but teachers are also infected with pneumonia. 

Mr Wei, a Beijing citizen, told FTV News: ‘Many, many are hospitalized. They don’t cough and have no symptoms. They just have a high temperature (fever) and many develop pulmonary nodules.’

An editor’s note by ProMed said: ‘This report suggests a widespread outbreak of an undiagnosed respiratory illness… It is not at all clear when this outbreak started, as it would be unusual for so many children to be affected so quickly.

‘The report does not say that any adults were affected, suggesting some exposure at the schools.

‘ProMed awaits more definitive information about the etiology and scope of this concerning illness in China.’

Pneumonia is an infection that affects one of both lungs, which can be deadly. The air sacs in the lungs may fill with fluid or pus.

Generally, pneumonia is not contagious, but the respiratory viruses and bacteria that lead to it are.

Walking pneumonia, which typically affects younger children, causes a sore throat, tiredness and a cough that can last up to months. It is called walking pneumonia as symptoms are usually mild enough for patients to continue walking around.

In serious cases, the illness can become pneumonia.

On Friday evening, Sun Rui rushed her three-year-old daughter, who had a temperature of 103 degrees Fahrenheit (40 degrees Celsius), to the Maternal and Child Health Care Hospital in Tongzhou District, Beijing, state-run media outlet Sixth Tone reported.

She was forced to wait alongside ‘hundreds’ of other parents for 13 hours to be seen by a physician, who diagnosed her daughter with mycoplasma pneumonia.

Local media outlets reported last month that hospitals across China were seeing skyrocketing infections.

Zhou Huixia, director of the children’s medical center at the Seventh Medical Center of the Chinese PLA General Hospital, told China Daily: ‘It is the first wave of mycoplasma pneumoniae infections since most Covid-19 containment measures were lifted at the beginning of this year.

‘The wave has appeared particularly ferocious since the National Day holiday in early October. Compared to previous years, we found more patients with mixed infections, drug resistance and lobar pneumonia.’

Lobar pneumonia affects one or more sections – lobes – of the lungs.

Infection numbers are due to peak in November, but concerns about antibiotic resistance are growing.

Mycoplasma pneumoniae is becoming more and more resistant to macrolides, a class of drugs commonly used to treat pneumonia.

A study published in February last year found that macrolide resistance was seen in more than 80 percent of mycoplasma pneumoniae in children hospitalized by the bacteria in China.

So far, very few children have died from walking pneumonia. 

Dr Hua Shaodong, a paediatrician at the Beijing Children’s Hospital, told China Daily:

‘There is a steady number of patients developing severe cases, but there are very few critical cases, and there are no related deaths so far.

‘The average days in [the] hospital for hospitalized patients is around seven to 14 days.’

Dr Krutika Kuppalli, an infectious disease physician who is part of the WHO’s Heatlth Emergencies Program, said on X (formerly Twitter) that the illness ‘could be anything.’

Wang Quanyi, deputy director of the Beijing CDC and chief epidemiologist, said that influenza, adenovirus and RSV are the top three respiratory infectious diseases in children at the moment.

On December 30, 2019, a ProMed ‘RFI’ (request for information) post – the same type as the pneumonia alert – was the initial warning of the Covid outbreak in Wuhan, China.