OVER recent months, some US hospitals have admitted record numbers of children with covid-19, leading to fears that the now-predominant delta variant of the coronavirus is more dangerous for this age group. Is that true?
When the pandemic took hold last year, we quickly learned that younger people are much less susceptible to serious covid-19. Age is by far the biggest risk factor for severe cases, with people aged 80 and over .
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Then the more-transmissible delta variant of the coronavirus sprang up in India, surging through the UK in May and doing the same in the US in June. By July, some US hospitals were reporting alarming numbers of under-18s needing hospital treatment for covid-19.
In southern states, such as Alabama, Arkansas, Florida and Louisiana, paediatric intensive care units started becoming overwhelmed. Francis Collins, head of the US National Institutes of Health, said last month that while there was no proof that delta affects children more severely, he was hearing from paediatricians that 鈥渢he kids who are in the hospital are both more numerous and more seriously ill鈥�.
One factor is that relatively few children are vaccinated, with covid-19 vaccines not used in under-12s and only a quarter of US 12 to 15-year-olds being fully vaccinated by mid-July.
Some studies, such as one from the UK in June, have found that, in general, unvaccinated people infected with delta are twice as likely to need hospital treatment as unvaccinated people with the alpha variant.
Until recently, no one had yet looked at the risk in under-18s specifically, however, nor at their rate of needing intensive care. US figures out this month from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) now show that the proportion of children admitted to hospital who needed intensive care was about the same in August as in the period up to mid-June, before delta took hold, at about .
The study didn鈥檛 look at the proportion of infected children who were admitted to hospital, though, leaving the possibility that delta does send a higher number to hospital for the same number of cases. But CDC head Rochelle Walensky said in a press conference that the figures had convinced her: 鈥淎lthough we are seeing more cases in children, and more overall cases, these studies demonstrated that there was not increased disease severity in children.鈥�
There have also been encouraging figures from New South Wales in Australia. In a , the proportion of children testing positive for delta who were admitted to hospital remained low, at about 2 per cent, and only 0.2 per cent of those testing positive needed intensive care.
For now, it looks as if delta isn鈥檛 overturning the idea that children are orders of magnitude less likely to get seriously ill than adults.
鈥淲e have had no indication in the UK that delta is any more severe during infection for children than any past variants,鈥� says Alasdair Munro at the University of Southampton, UK. 鈥淚t is more transmissible, so we would expect to see more infections, all other things being equal.鈥�
It is notable that the US hospitals reporting overflowing children鈥檚 ICUs are in southern states, which have lower vaccination rates among adults, and are less likely to mandate general covid-19 precautions such as wearing face masks.
鈥淚t鈥檚 a numbers game. As the numbers have gone up, the [children鈥檚] hospitalisations have gone up too,鈥� says .
