From health care workers on the front lines to researchers working behind the scenes, many Manitobans are working to combat the novel coronavirus.
Researchers at the Children’s Hospital Research Institute of Manitoba (CHRIM) are involved in a range of studies involving COVID-19 and children.
CHRIM chief executive officer and scientific director Dr. Terry Klassen is working on two studies with the Pediatric Emergency Research Network, an international group of researchers who focus on children visiting emergency departments.
Klassen’s first study involves the risk factors of COVID-19 in children who visit emergency departments. Klassen says the aim is to recruit 12,500 children from 57 different emergency departments around the world.
“There are two major questions we’re asking for this research study. First of all, what are the risk factors for a child who presents like this for testing positive — is there anything you can tell in their symptoms or history that suggests they might be positive,” Klassen explained.
The second component of the study deals with children who develop severe outcomes from COVID-19.
Klassen is working on another study focusing on children who are asymptomtic, which aims to recruit 400 children who aren’t showing any symptoms of COVID-19, but are tested when they are admitted to the emergency department for unrelated reasons.
“It’s looking at children with asymptomatic SARS-COV-2 infection, and of these 400 children, we’ll be matching them with children who do not test positive,” he said.
“And really what we’re trying to get at with this study is the whole issue of children with asymptomatic infection and what is their role. We’re looking back at the household in which they live, how many people develop infection within that household.”
Dr. Lauren Kelly, a pediatrics and community health sciences professor at the University of Manitoba, is working on the solidarity trial with the World Health Organization.
“This really exciting opportunity for us here in Manitoba to contribute to global literature on evaluating different treatments for COVID-19,” Dr. Kelly said.
“The power of having a global trial is that we’re learning things really quickly. Across the world, more that 500 patients get recruited every day, and this means that we’re able to better answer questions in a timely manner.”
Dr. Kelly is also researching severe health outcomes for children who are hospitalized with COVID-19.
“I’m a mom of a toddler and I thought, well, what happens if he ends up hospitalized?” Kelly said. “So we’ve been really fortunate in Canada that we haven’t had a lot of hospitalizations for children with COVID. However, if a case does occur we wanted to be able to offer them access to some of the best therapies, and this is only really possibly by enrolling them in clinical trials.”
Emerging virus expert Dr. Jason Kindrachuk has been working at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon for over three months. He says they’ve learned about a decade’s worth of information in the last 10 months.
“For those us who work in emerging viruses or on COVID-19, it certainly I think has aged all of us because of the rapidity that we’re learning new things about the virus, we’re learning decades worth of material in the past few months,” said Kindrachuk, who is the Canada research chair on emerging and re-emerging viruses with the University of Manitoba.
“I can’t impress upon people enough that we learned a monumental amount of information in a very short period of time, but all of that has been facilitated by collaboration and openness among scientists across the globe.”
Kindrachuk also says research efforts are shifting to not only finding a vaccine, but looking at long-term complications for patients who recover from COVID-19.
“I think we’re realizing it is going to be a difficult road ahead, and it’s not simply trying to protect the most vulnerable,” he said.
“It’s really important and critical for us to protect everybody from infection because we don’t know what they’re going to face for the remainder of their lives once they actually have recovered from the initial stage of infection.”