Parents are scared to take their kids to the doctor. Experts say that needs to change
About 70% to 80% of U.S. children are skipping their routine checkups because of fears about possible infection from the new coronavirus, the American Academy of Pediatrics said.
Doctors across the country are pleading with parents to put their fears aside because missed visits can put a child’s health in more danger, especially in kids under 2.
“Parents are scared. They’re calling and canceling appointments” Dr. Sally Goza, a pediatrician and president of the AAP, told WCVB5 in a television interview. “If you have a child who’s not developing at the appropriate rate or in the appropriate way, to wait six months or a year to catch that can be devastating.”
Goza practices in Georgia and said her office is seeing less than half of its usual patients, the station reported.
The organization, which has about 67,000 members, recommends that children, particularly under the age of 2, see their pediatrician for visits, Dr. Jennifer Trachtenberg told McClatchy News.
Making sure babies and toddlers are developing as they should and not developing illnesses like jaundice, which can occur within the first few days to weeks of life, is important, she said.
Other health issues like thyroid problems, iron deficiencies and slow language development are also critical to monitor during routine checkups, Trachtenberg said.
“Even though it’s scary, it’s important to venture out in a safe manner to see their pediatrician when necessary,” she said of parents and their children.
Children have not been seriously affected by the pathogen, but there is significant evidence that young people can be silent carriers of COVID-19 — the disease the virus causes — and can put others at risk of infection, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Trachtenberg works in a private practice that she owns with five other partners in New York’s Upper East Side. She said her office has seen about a 75% drop in visits.
Some of the drops can be attributed to families fleeing New York City — the city with the most confirmed cases and deaths in the U.S.— she said.
“We are on the front lines in a different way,” Trachtenberg said. “Not in the hospital scene or emergency rooms, but in the front lines of all the calls and questions that parents have.”
Before COVID-19, her office didn’t participate in telemedicine — doctor visits over video and phone calls — but now the practice is vital to ensure patients are getting the care they need.
Videos are really important because doctors can listen to a child’s breathing and voice, both of which can show signs of chest congestion, Trachtenberg said. “You can tell just by watching the child play, too.”
Monitoring a child’s mental health is important as well, especially now because they could be experiencing stress from social distancing, she said.
“Not everything can be done over telehealth,” she said, “Sometimes it’s important because it may be able to help discern which patients need to come into the office.”
If that’s the case, Trachtenberg said special scheduling has been put in place to make sure sick and healthy children are separated, with “lots of intense, deep cleaning” in between, she added.
Visits to your pediatrician are also important to keep up with necessary vaccines.
The most common vaccinations given during pediatric visits are those that treat infections like the whooping cough, tetanus, measles and meningitis, a dangerous infection in the brain.
“During this pandemic, about the last thing we need is to start an outbreak of vaccine-preventable diseases like measles on top of COVID-19,” the Washington State Department of Health wrote in Medium, McClatchy News reported.
The CDC has also said that a stop in vaccinations could lead to us “battling epidemics of diseases we thought we had conquered decades ago.”
In 1974, cases of the whooping cough in Japan barely reached 400 because about 80% of the country’s children were receiving the vaccine for the infection, the CDC said.
Five years later, immunization rates dropped to 10% and more than 13,000 people contracted the whooping cough and 41 died, the agency said. “When routine vaccination was resumed, the disease numbers dropped again.”
This story was originally published April 28, 2020 at 2:01 PM with the headline "Parents are scared to take their kids to the doctor. Experts say that needs to change."
