An empty playground in New York on May 19th.
Photographer: Spencer Platt / Getty Images
Photographer: Spencer Platt / Getty Images
Children with Covid-19 are rarely hospitalized compared to adults, but the rate has grown and about a third of those hospitalized are included in a subset of a federal study published Friday needs intensive care.
The study by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention analyzed pediatric hospitalization data for 576 cases in 14 states. It found that about eight children were hospitalized for every 100,000 infected, compared to more than 164 adults per 100,000.
But between March and July, rates of hospitalization of children gradually increased, with Black and Latino children hospitalized at a higher rate. Among 208 hospital children with full medical charm reviews, a third were give inted to an intensive care unit. One died and 12 needed invasive ventilation.
The report comes as President Donald Trump has urged schools to reopen in the U.S., and many large districts have backed down. This week, in encouraging schools to reopen, the president falsely claimed in a Fox News interview that children are “almost immune to this disease.”
Continued monitoring is needed to “identify the burden and outcomes of COVID-19 associated hospitalizations among children,” the researchers wrote in the report. “These data will help better define the clinical spectrum of disease in children and the contributions of race and ethnicity and underlying medical conditions for hospitalizations and outcomes. “
The hospital percentage among Latinos was around 16 per 100,000 while black children had a rate of about 11 per 100,000.
There remains a lack of knowledge about how Covid-19 is transmitted to and from children. Some early evidence has suggested that children – and especially younger children – do not transmit the virus as often as adults or even older children.
While children appear to be at a lower risk of becoming very ill, a small number of deaths or intensive care are required as a result of respiratory failure often associated with the virus or of a terrible inflammatory condition sometimes described as similar to Kawasaki disease which causes problems of heart or circulation.
Inflammatory syndrome
On Friday, the National Health Institutes also launched a program to identify which children may be most at risk for developing that condition, known as multi-systemic inflammatory syndrome.
The CDC study examined cases reported to the COVID-19 – Associated Hospitalization Surveillance Network, a population-based surveillance system that collects data on laboratory-certified COVID-19 – associated hospitalizations in 14 states.
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