According to a study published by the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), children now account for 15% of COVID-19 cases in the United States, and there were nearly 94,000 new infections among children in the past week.
In March 2020, when the pandemic first started, 14.3% of new cases were children. As of August 5, children accounted for 15% of COVID-19 cases in the United States
The study found that nearly 4.3 million children in the United States have tested positive for COVID-19 so far, an increase of 94,000 cases in the past week alone.
Florida and Louisiana are among the states that have seen a surge in cases in the United States, driven by the highly contagious delta virus. On Monday, Florida alone reported 28,317 new cases. CDCThe largest hospital in Louisiana recently reported that one in five new patients are children. Fox 5.
“This is not your grandfather’s COVID,” Dr. Mark Klein, chief physician of New Orleans Children’s Hospital, told ABCof Good Morning America on Monday.
“We are hospitalizing a record number of children,” Klein added. “Today, half of the children in our hospital are under two years old. Most of the other children are between five and ten years old-too young to be vaccinated.”
Dr. John Brownstein, an epidemiologist at Boston Children’s Hospital, warned that children will soon become “the main carriers of virus transmission” because they are “the remaining people who are not eligible for vaccination.”
“Although the serious consequences of COVID-19 infection in children are still relatively low compared to adults, the current exponential increase in hospitalization is a very worrying trend,” Bronstein added.
AAP Chairman Lee Savio Beers wrote an article letter Dr. Janet Woodcock, Acting Commissioner Food and Drug Administration August 6. In the letter, Beers urged the FDA to work “actively” to develop vaccines for children under 12 to protect the wider population.
The FDA recently Pfizer And Moderna to increase the number of children aged 5-11 in clinical trials of its COVID-19 vaccine, but Beers believes that medical officials are not working fast enough to solve the problem of transmission among children.
“While we appreciate the prudent steps taken to collect more safety data, we urge the FDA to carefully consider the impact of this decision on the timeline for authorizing vaccines for this age group,” Beers said. “In our view, the rise of the Delta variant has changed the risk-benefit analysis of authorized children’s vaccination.”
He added: “The FDA should strongly consider authorizing these vaccines for children aged 5-11 years based on the data from the initial registration cohort. These data are already available, while continuing to follow the safety data of the expanded cohort after marketing.”
