EL PASO, Texas – The American Academy of Pediatrics and the Association of Pediatric Hospitals report that 338,000 children nationwide have tested positive for Covid-19 since July 30.
Pediatrics from Texas Tech indicates that there are 1,900 children who test positive in El Paso.
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The spike in children testing positive for the virus has parents at the forefront about sending their children to school as personal instructions begin.
“I’m really scared. You know that positive cases are coming up more and more,” says Irma Garcia, a mother of two based on age, a teenager and a disabled daughter.
Garcia tries to keep both of these little ones away from school as personal classes begin; she says she wants to protect them from the coronavirus.
And although pediatricians say that children may have the same Covid-19 symptoms as adults, children do not always show symptoms.
“The trick about kids is that some of them run with Covid-19 and have absolutely no symptoms. So, it’s a little hard to know, did it or almost not?” said Sarah Zate, associate professor of pediatrics on the El Techo campus of Texas Tech University.
There has been a 90 percent spike in children diagnosed with Covid 19 in the past month, according to data released this week by the AAP.
Locally, ABC-7 knows of at least one teen who died from the coronavirus.
All of this is contrary to what the public was told about Covid-19 in children when the novel coronavirus was first reported in Asian countries. At the time, it was said that children were immune.
But then, says Zate, it spread to Europe and we learned more about Covid-19.
“We believed that children could not spread it. Now we are looking at data from Denmark. Children are spreading it,” Zate said.
That’s what scares Garcia, who has a disabled child and a man with health problems.
“It’s a little scary because I have my oldest daughter. She’s disabled and she has health problems. I really do not want that through, or my husband either. They both have health problems,” Garcia says, adding that she is afraid of enemy could bring their children home the virus and infect other family members.
Zate says Garcia has every reason to be alarmed.
“Children who have family members who have things like diabetes, and uncontrolled high blood pressure, cancer and lupus. Those children will probably be fine, but we have to remember that they will bring this house, eventually they will probably bring it home. “
Garcia will probably be able to keep her boy at home.
But she also has a teenager who is eager to see his friends after she’s locked up in the summer.
Zate says experts agree that it will probably not be a good idea for instruction in class to begin until the spread of the infection is under control.
“And by control is the number she’s set up, in El Paso, it would be seven new cases a day. Seven to ten new cases a day. If we were in that zone, I would be completely comfortable sending each child back to school, “she said.
The Borderland has not seen that low number of cases in a long time. On Wednesday alone, the health department El Paso reported 274 new cases.
