In the United States, the number of hospital admissions has reached record levels due to the rapid impact of children on the Omicron variant.
According to the French news agency AFP, although experts are concerned and emphasizing the need to speed up vaccination in children, initial indications are that the rate of serious illness from the new strain is actually lower and faster. The reason for the increase is that it is highly contagious.
Raw data can also be affected by accidental infections that are not the main reason for hospitalization.
Fast growing numbers
According to the American Academy of Pediatrics, in the week ended December 23, approximately 199,000 children were infected with Covid 19, an increase of 50% from earlier in the month.
In the week ended December 28, the average number of hospital admissions for people aged 0-17 was 378, an increase of 66.1% over the previous week and the highest ever. The number is higher, surpassing the peak seen on September 1 during the delta wave, according to official figures.
Apart from children, the age group with the highest hospital admission rate is 18 to 29 years. However, older people have significantly lower rates of serious illness than this variant.
Since the onset of the global epidemic, there have been a total of 820,000 deaths from cod in the United States, including 803 deaths among people aged 0-18.
Based on testing of tissue samples in a Hong Kong laboratory, it was found that Omicron thrombosis changes 70 times faster in the ducts leading to the lungs than in deltas, helping to explain its extreme spread throughout the population. Can be found
"I think it's a numbers game right now," Jim Versalov, a pathologist and immunologist at Texas Children's Hospital, the largest children's hospital in the United States, told AFP.
"Based on the data we've collected so far, Omicron isn't causing a more serious infection, it's affecting a lot of children, and that's why we're in a pediatric hospital because of the code," he said. Looking for more admissions.
Henry Bernstein, a pediatrician at Northwell Health Hospital in New York, told AFP:
As far as cases and hospital admissions are concerned, there are several possible reasons why the rate of hospital admissions is increasing faster than the younger ones.
President Joe Biden's chief medical adviser, Anthony Fookie, said this week that because hospitals were routinely testing the code of each person admitted, they were accidentally reporting more cases of corona virus.
Emphasis on vaccination
In addition, children between the ages of 5 and 11 have the lowest vaccination rates, with the group being the last to be vaccinated at the end of November.
According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), only 15 percent of the 5- to 11-year-olds are fully vaccinated, compared to 84 percent of people 12 years of age or older.
Vaccination of young children is reinforced by a new CDC report which found that serious side effects of the vaccine were extremely rare in children aged 5-11 years, while cases of heartburn occurred in children aged 12-29 years. Less than men.
Only children aged 0-5 are now ineligible for the vaccine, and are expected to be approved in the coming months.
