The assumption that children are protected has informed the medical and public discourse concerning vaccinations in Israel and around the world, but COVID has long-term effects, the extent and severity of which are not yet clear.

About 60 percent report reduced daily functioning because of the symptoms.

“What’s interesting, is that in some of the children, it really appears as a direct continuation of severe illness but in very many of the children, there is a severe illness, followed by a lull of several months and only then do the symptoms of long COVID begin," says Ashkenazi-Hoffnung.

However, she also says that there are "a few children here who, a year after the illness, haven’t recovered, and they have symptoms that are affecting their day-to-day functioning.

She adds that about 15 percent of the children treated at the clinic have been found to have no antibodies, even though they tested positive on a PCR test.

Less than 1 percent of children who have been tested have required hospitalization, and cases of severe illness are rare and appear mainly in those with pre-existing conditions.

The assumption that children are protected has been part of the medical and public discourse concerning vaccinations.

A recently published Health Ministry survey of 13,000 children who contracted COVID has found that 11.2 percent of them suffered from at least one symptom after recovering and 1.85-4.6 percent still had symptoms after six months.

“Fifteen percent of the children who come to us trained in various sports for three or four hours a day six days a week, and after the coronavirus they can’t even walk for five minutes.

Because of lack of familiarity with the symptoms, children often come to the clinic due to one of the symptoms, but then it turns out they are suffering from additional ones.

The syndrome usually appears eight to ten weeks after the illness, even among children who had light cases.

“A year ago we opened a clinic that treated the continuing symptoms in children

Schlesinger says that they now have cases of children coming "long after they had fallen ill, with the most prevalent symptom being severe difficulty in breathing, damage to the nervous system and the brain, very severe pains and neurological phenomena, alongside dermatological problems like rashes and problems with the digestive system."