Toddler on ventilator fights for his life

When her 2-year-old started feeling sick early last week, Tiffany Jackson, 21, didn't think it might be COVID-19. No one else in the family was sick. Adrian James just had a bit of a cough. She gave him cough syrup and put a humidifier in his room. But by Friday he was sweaty and his breathing was labored. Jackson took him to an emergency room in her small town of Mount Vernon, Illinois. Doctors and nurses there did a chest X-ray and swabbed him for COVID - and then airlifted the child to Cardinal Glennon Children's Hospital in St. Louis, about 80 miles (129 km) away. Jackson followed in a car, her grandmother at the wheel. They made the usually 90 minute-drive in about an hour. "I didn’t know if he was going to make it or not," Jackson said. "I was very emotional and just very upset."

Her son is one of more than 840,000 children under the age of four to contract COVID-19 in the United States since the beginning of the pandemic.

By late Tuesday night, Adrian was intubated and heavily sedated, wrapped in his baby blanket with his favorite Paw Patrol stuffed animal at hand.

Adrian, who will be 3 years old next month, had developed pneumonia in his left lung. He was breathing fast, trying to gulp air with 76 respirations per minute, nearly twice the normal 40. At the hospital, doctors and nurses wearing masks, face shields and protective gowns sedated him and put him on a breathing tube attached to a ventilator in the intensive care unit.

Jackson has been sleeping on a couch in his room in the ICU. She does not know how her son contracted COVID. She had COVID last summer. She says she did not get vaccinated for COVID due to a rare auto-immune disorder called Guillain-Barre syndrome that she contracted as a result of a flu shot when she was 16. The syndrome, which is incurable, causes nervous system damage.

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