Mom urges caution after twins become ‘violently ill’

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This article was published 05/01/2022 (1535 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A Winnipeg mom who says her five-year-old twins contracted COVID-19 is warning parents to be cautious as schools prepare to resume in-person learning later this month.

Tracey, who doesn’t want her surname published to protect her privacy, believes her son contracted COVID-19 at school before his kindergarten class went on the holiday break.

The five-year-old started showing symptoms right before Christmas dinner on Dec. 25, and soon became “violently ill.”

“I’m assuming he brought it home from kindergarten,” his mother said.

Tracey said she wanted to let other parents know about her family’s experience because of misinformation that has suggested infections in children are mild. That’s not always the case, she says.

“I definitely wouldn’t wish any parent to have to watch their child go through this, thinking ‘Oh, it’s going to be a mild illness.’ It’s definitely not.”

Her twins received their first dose of the pediatric vaccine as soon as it became available in Manitoba, but they have chronic lung conditions and were born premature. They’ve become seriously ill, with fever, vomiting and asthma-like symptoms.

“So getting COVID was one of the worst fears and we were lucky to avoid it for the past two years. So being high risk, he was pretty badly symptomatic,” she said of her son who first showed symptoms.

The family was monitoring for symptoms of the virus because one of her four children had informed her someone in their class was a close contact of someone who’d been infected.

Her five-year-old sons became too sick to wait in line for a PCR test. Tracey, who has been triple-vaccinated, was tested and did receive a positive PCR result. She is still recovering while caring for her children.

After taking rapid tests, one of the twins tested positive for COVID-19, but the other tested negative.

Tracey said she believes they both have COVID-19.

No outbreak has been reported at their school in Westwood.

The boys are recovering — their fevers broke and they are no longer vomiting — but they still have runny noses, shortness of breath and other asthma-like symptoms.

Tracey said she tried to do everything right. She’s glad she’d cancelled plans to host her family and friends for Christmas; she said she regrets not keeping her kids home from school when she noticed case counts rising. They’d already missed preschool because of the pandemic, and she wanted them to experience kindergarten.

“I wanted them to have those experiences and I 110 per cent regret every minute of it. If I could go back in time, I totally would have pulled them out when the cases were going up.”

Seeing some people complain online about having to arrange child care when remote learning continues is hard to stomach after she’s had to ask friends to be on standby in case her kids need to be hospitalized and she’s unable to take them, Tracey said.

So far, none of the family members has needed to go to the hospital, for which she’s thankful.

“Learn from my mistake, and even if our government isn’t going to do anything and they’re going to use our kids and our school staff as a sacrificial lamb for the economy, keep your kids home if you can, because it’s not worth watching them suffer.”

katie.may@freepress.mb.ca