And so they wait: The other epidemic among United States youth during COVID-19.

Since summer 2020, five to ten new children and teens have been presenting to our emergency department (ED) each day with the same emergency. These are numbers we have never experienced before. Our patients are of different ages, genders, races, ethnicities, backgrounds, and socioeconomic statuses. But they share the potential for lifelong sequelae of their disease. Given this dramatic rise in cases since the summer, we are clearly in the middle of an epidemic. But these patients don't have COVID-19 or another infectious disease. Perhaps if they did, a greater effort would be put towards addressing this problem.