Let's talk scary headlines

White Lung Disease: should you be worried?

Last week, the world was treated to breathless headlines about a “mysterious pneumonia affecting children in China.”

Then several days ago, NBC News posted an article about increased pneumonia cases in an Ohio county:

Despite the most relevant sentence (which I have circled in red)—right on cue, the DoomTweeters all chimed in with their predictions of another global pandemic.

Even some Republican politicians bought into the emerging panic:

Fortunately, there were some cooler heads in the medical community, starting with our friend

Jay Bhattacharya

from Stanford:

Many had very helpful tweets educating people about the pathogen in question:

Dr. Nicole Saphier provided informative context about the inherent cyclical nature of the infections in question:

As a general pediatrician who has seen “walking pneumonia” in children for my entire 20-year-career, I found myself rolling my eyes at the eagerness with which so many pundits reached for the possibility of *another pandemic‼️*

Apparently, I wasn’t the only doctor who had that reaction:

Monica Gandhi added to the discourse with her characteristic calm and diplomacy:

Circling back to China, the outbreak of severe respiratory infections in children was actually found to be related to the “immunity debt” caused by their prolonged and draconian lockdowns:

In other words, if you lock kids up for years, their immune systems become stunted and weak, making them unusually vulnerable to normal seasonal respiratory viruses .

To summarize: I had originally planned on writing a piece for you all to calm the panic over the “mysterious new pneumonia,” but before I could even find the time to start on it, my esteemed Twitter colleagues had already made all my points for me. 

Not mad about it!

I hope you find the information contained therein helpful and calming—as goodness knows the approach of the holidays is stressful enough.

I will leave you with the advice of Dr. Saphier again, this time on tips to stay healthy this winter:

Kristen Walsh, MD, FAAP Community/Clinical Academic Pediatrician

Dr. Kristen Walsh is a board-certified pediatrician in northern NJ. She is the mother of twin teenagers and has over 20 years of clinical experience in both academic and private practice settings. For the past 10 years, she has volunteered at a school for special needs children and been involved in early childhood advocacy on both the state and national levels. She was a co-author on a BMJ Paediatrics op-ed entitled “COVID-19 and the unseen pandemic of child abuse.” Her last piece for Restore Childhood can be read here.