Healthcare workers put on PPE on the COVID-19 ICU floor of the University of Massachusetts (UMass) Memorial Hospital in Worcester, Massachusetts, U.S., on Monday, Dec. 27, 2021. (Allison Dinner/Bloomberg/Getty Images/CNN)
A five-fold increase in pediatric admissions in New York City this month. Close to double the numbers admitted in Washington, D.C. And nationwide, on average, pediatric hospitalizations in the U.S. are up 35 per cent in just the past week.
The highly transmissible Omicron variant is teaming up with the busy holiday season to infect more children across the United States than ever before, and children's hospitals are bracing for it to get even worse. "I think we are going to see more numbers now than we have ever seen," Dr. Stanley Spinner, who is chief medical officer and vice president at Texas Children's Pediatrics & Urgent Care in Houston, told CNN. |
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"Cases are continuing to rise between Christmas gatherings and we're going to continue to see more numbers this week from that," Spinner said in a telephone interview.
"Now we're going to have New Year's on top of that this coming weekend, with more people getting together -- more exposures and then those numbers will continue to climb," he added. MORE KIDS IN HOSPITALS Across the country, pediatricians are bracing for a busy January. "It's almost like you can see the train coming down the track and you're just hoping it doesn't go off the rails," Dr. Claudia Hoyen, director of pediatric infection control at UH Rainbow Babies and Children's Hospital in Cleveland told CNN. "It's going to be a very interesting couple of weeks. We've just had all of these kids mixing together with everybody else during Christmas. We have one more holiday to get through with New Year's, and then we'll be sending everybody back to school," Hoyen said. "Everybody is kind of waiting on the edge, wondering what we'll end up seeing." And while the Delta variant infected more children than previous variants, Omicron is looking even worse, Spinner said. |
"So that is a concern to us, especially with those that can't be vaccinated under 5 or those that are not fully vaccinated or not vaccinated at all that are eligible over 5. So it is a big concern."
While Spinner sees little evidence the Omicron variant is causing more severe disease in children than previous variants did, he's also seeing no evidence it's milder.
"We do everything we can to keep a child out of the hospital. So if they're admitted to the hospital, then that means that they're already pretty sick," Spinner said.
"They're needing oxygen. They're needing some other assistance. Even if they're just really dehydrated, needing IV fluids, most of these kids that we're admitting for COVID-19 are kids that have respiratory issues -- that they need oxygen and they need other support. So they're going to be pretty sick. You know, you don't see kids that are not very sick in the hospital."
Most of the really sick children are unvaccinated or under-vaccinated, he said. "I can tell you that virtually all of our kids that are hospitalized have either been unvaccinated or not fully vaccinated -- maybe having received one dose but not having the second dose and not having the full protection from the vaccine," Spinner said.
VIRUS FINDS A NEW NICHE: KIDS
Children are an easy target for the virus, Dr. Juan Salazar, physician in chief at Connecticut Children's Medical Center in Hartford, told CNN
"It's affecting larger communities and it's certainly affecting children in a way that we hadn't seen before. And that's new compared to last year," he said. Only about a third of eligible children, ages 5 and older, are vaccinated in Connecticut, Salazar estimated.
"Because of that, the virus has found a niche. At least here in Connecticut, it does look like it shifted in where it is going," he added. Younger children who cannot be vaccinated yet, or older kids who have yet to be fully vaccinated or vaccinated at all, are becoming infected, he said.
"Perhaps it is more widely spread now that we've liberalized our social gatherings. Perhaps some of the masks have come off -- families are tired. They are not willing to undergo some of the strict isolation policies from a year ago," Salazar added.
"And so that has allowed these new variants to spread more widely. And for that reason it's affecting kids who at this point are the most at-risk population because they're not vaccinated, or many of them are not."
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