Guardian article on paediatric admissions New York

[OhDear2200]

www.theguardian.com/world/2021/dec/27/us-child-covid-omicron-infections-school-closures

Curious - as we are not vaccinating children (most anyway) should we expect an increase in hospital admissions for children?

Or is there something I’m missing?

It does say hospitalised with covid so it may not be because of covid. Children go to hospital all the time for other reasons, so as covid increases in community so will cases on admission but it doesnt mean its because of covid.

Plus quadrupled could mean going from 1 to 4 but very vulnerable kids will sadly always be at risk whether its covid, flu or pneumnia.

Worldwide data should be enougb proof that kids are largely unaffected

There was a post about it on reddit covid board yesterday, but I couldn't really make out what is going on. They seemed to talk about UK data. Do we have more children hospitalized?

www.reddit.com/r/Coronavirus/comments/roy21o/nyc_covid_surge_striking_jump_in_pediatric/?sort=confidence

My cousin is a ward sister at a children's Hospital in NW England, she said all routine appointments have been cancelled and various wards have been repurposed to use as Covid wards. Hopefully they won't need to use them and they're just being overly cautious.

I see reddit posted on mumsnet a lot - its a commercial site and not a reliable source at all. Do people realise this?

Surely The Guardian is (vaguely) replicable and surely questioning the same issues as ‘with’ and ‘for’?

Reliable

@Hodl

My cousin is a ward sister at a children's Hospital in NW England, she said all routine appointments have been cancelled and various wards have been repurposed to use as Covid wards. Hopefully they won't need to use them and they're just being overly cautious.

My friend work in children's A&E - I spoke to her a couple of weeks ago and she said they were seeing more children with covid again now, but the symptoms are mostly abdominal with sickness and pain etc and also blood pressure problems - both things they could treat.

https://uk.news.yahoo.com/covid-hospital-admissions-children-highest-start-pandemic-102857039.html?gucereferrer=aHR0cHM6Ly90LmNvLw&guceereferrersig=AQAAAF9-tO9e7rJbQoMXAqW7h-kypdX9H-QwZXJoGThOY63dEA7vs6R9vDcnSExUU6EUeU-yg90ZbRVaPky2re3uaQck8qHCHDWgCh3I9O9D-QLqreezO4YfEqKahABLUmDol48WEUyUHahVAyIzFCVQEJiA16f5r0MzlG4VXNrg11&guccounter=2

Its not new. Similar was said about SA but good that all treatable.

@Watapalava

I see reddit posted on mumsnet a lot - its a commercial site and not a reliable source at all. Do people realise this?

Reddit is just a forum site like Mumsnet. I don't think anyone believes reddit comments are particularly reliable, but they can be useful for finding references to more reliable sources (like MN comments).

New York has a incredible amount of cases. Probably similar to London if not more. There surveillance is nowhere near as good it seems, so they really don't know.

It seems that there is a lot more emphasis on how serious a disease Covid is for children in the US and that they need to all get their children vaccinated. The data doesn't really back it up, even if vaccination is a good thing.

But I guess if you can't vaccinate the adults, you have to vaccinate the kids? (NYC I think does have a very high rate of vaccinated adults).

But if a significant percentage of children have Covid then a small number will be hospitalised both with and for Covid.

The messaging really is very different but I guess over there, a large amount are anti vaxx, Covid deniers, which means that others are the complete opposite and think their healthy kid is going to die or get long Covid. Neither is based in reality.

@Watapalava

I see reddit posted on mumsnet a lot - its a commercial site and not a reliable source at all. Do people realise this?

Reddit is primarily a news aggregation/discussion site. Most discussions are directly linked to an article as the source of discussion. It’s as reliable/unreliable as most media sites tbh and there is an onus on the reader/contributer to use their own judgement and skills to discern the facts.

The most popular corona virus board is pretty stringently moderated and doesn’t allow for things to stray massively off topic or wander into politics (like here for instance). The comments are a pretty useful insight into public and personal perspectives globally although Reddit does have issues from being targeted from bots/trolls.

It’s a bit like Wikipedia in that sense, it’s user generated content but at best it’s a starting point because author/commented bias isn’t as obvious as it would be using main media sources with established bias.

There are always kids in hospital with viruses (covid/flu etc) it's nothing new

Yes. It's been the case in each wave that as cases in children rise, hospitalisations in children rise a bit also. It's a misconception that children are not negatively effected by covid but true that the actual numbers of children needing hospitalised is tiny compared to adults.

The pattern of admissions does look concerning and it's hard to argue that there are coincidentally a lot more children admitted for other things at the same time that community rates rise. I do think there's a lot of denial around the impact of Covid on children on here. It's not many thankfully but it does seem to be more than in previous waves.

The Washington Post is also reporting this. It says "Omicron and children: Pediatric hospitals in parts of U.S. filling fast.

About 800 kids have been admitted nearly every day this week, with those in Ohio, Texas, Pennsylvania and New York hit particularly hard by the juggernaut variant." ...

"As of Thursday, there were 1,987 confirmed or suspected pediatric covid-19 patients hospitalized nationally, a 31 percent jump in 10 days, according to a Washington Post analysis."

@Remmy123 well of course that’s the case. But not helpful really because otherwise you might as say that about all hospital admissions with Covid….well there has always been hospital admissions because of virus’s.

"The New York State Department of Health on Friday warned of a “striking increase” in new hospital admissions for children." ...

"Acting state Health Commissioner Dr. Mary T. Bassett urged parents to get their eligible children vaccinated against COVID.

“The risks of COVID-19 for children are real,” Bassett said in a statement. “We are alerting New Yorkers to this recent striking increase in pediatric COVID-19 admissions so that pediatricians, parents and guardians can take urgent action to protect our youngest New Yorkers.”

That seems pretty clear.

@milkyaqua

"The New York State Department of Health on Friday warned of a “striking increase” in new hospital admissions for children." ...

"Acting state Health Commissioner Dr. Mary T. Bassett urged parents to get their eligible children vaccinated against COVID.

“The risks of COVID-19 for children are real,” Bassett said in a statement. “We are alerting New Yorkers to this recent striking increase in pediatric COVID-19 admissions so that pediatricians, parents and guardians can take urgent action to protect our youngest New Yorkers.”

That seems pretty clear.

Is it though? My understanding from comments I have seen, is that they didn't quantify it with data.

Surely before you panic parents you should do this?

More kids infected will mean more hospitalisations.

More kids will be hospitalised in the winter anyway. And RSV / flu could be a lot worse this year.

I am not trying to minimise it at all - kids in hospital is a scary thing, but parents really need to know the real risk.

As far as I can tell, they have not published this.

Milkyaquas post provided the relevant data, @Ohsofedupwiththis .

No one is saying that any panicking should be done, and it's disappointing to see this wheeled out again as a way to minimise the data we do have.

We're human and we'd all like a neat way to explain this away, but we have to work with the data that we have and face what it's telling us, rather than stay in denial about the effect of covid on kids.

www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/children-risk-omicron-covid-variant-south-africa-b972091.html

SA data now showing that children at 20% higher risk of hospitalisation than with Delta.

I do not know how easy it is to draw parallels between US cities and UK.

I think the levels of unaddressed health problems among poor people in the US are massive compared with UK. And levels of morbid obesity and undiagnosed/poorly managed T2 diabetes in children/adolescents - which multiply Covid risks - are also much higher.

I used to buy the Guardian. But I am dubious about its reliability of late.

@milkyaqua @Barbie22 - quoting the Washington Post or 'warnings from the NYS department of health' is not providing data. I am not intending to minimise the situation but people do seem to enjoy sounding informed based on very little.

twitter.com/jneill/status/1474104088191188996?s=21

8% of total covid hospitalisations on 21 Dec were children.

That's for England only. 999 paediatric admissions so far this month.