Mum of schoolgirl too ill to leave home due to long Covid slams officials for withholding info

The mother of a schoolgirl who is too ill to leave the house after developing a Covid-linked condition has accused officials of deliberately withholding information about the illness.Helen Goss, whose daughter was seven when she caught Covid-19 at the start of the pandemic, told the Scottish Covid-19 Inquiry her daughter developed a "really scary" illness a few weeks after she recovered from a mild Covid-19 infection, which saw the previously active girl become lethargic, sensitive to light and sound, and, eventually, unable to leave the house at all.She said she felt she was "under suspicion" over the cause of her daughter's illness as she fought for two years for clinicians to acknowledge it, and it was only in 2022 that it was diagnosed as suspected Paediatric Inflammatory Multisystem Syndrome (PIMS), an illness that can follow a Covid-19 infection in children.Ms Goss, who suffers from long Covid herself, said this stemmed from a "big reluctance" on the part of the medical establishment to diagnose PIMS, leading them to write it off as caused by "isolation and anxiety", which she described as "so infuriating".She alleged emails existed to show that senior decision-makers in the NHS and UK Government were aware of PIMS at the time, but they had chosen to suppress this so as not to alarm parents.Ms Goss, of Westhill, Aberdeenshire, said: "In their ivory towers they decided they weren't even going to tell the public that this condition even existed, which I think is stupid."If I'd known what she was suffering from I would have taken her straight there, I wouldn't have hesitated."The context of fear around that time, 'don't go near the hospital, save the NHS', I would have just completely ignored all that and taken my kid