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Less than a week before the nation’s second-largest school district in Los Angeles welcomes students to campus, a new study from the American Academy of Pediatrics found “a continuing substantial increase” in Covid cases among the children.
“As of August 5, nearly 4.3 million children have tested positive for Covid-19 since the start of the pandemic,” said the AAP report. “Almost 94,000 cases were added last week, a continuing substantial increase. After decreasing at the beginning of the summer, the cases of children have not stopped increasing since the beginning of July.
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Since the start of the pandemic, children have accounted for 14.3% of the total cumulative cases. For the week ending August 5, children accounted for 15.0% of weekly reported Covid-19 cases. It may not seem like a big difference, but the fact is the recent increase.
Of course, as more adults are vaccinated, children will account for a larger portion of new cases, simply because children over 12 cannot yet be vaccinated. But it’s not just the percentage. The raw numbers are also increasing.
Over the two weeks from July 22 to August 5, there was a 4% increase in the cumulative number of Covid cases in children. About 165,550 of these cases were added in those two weeks alone, bringing the total number of pediatric cases from 4,126,570 to 4,292,120, according to the AAP analysis.
The good news is that children appear to be more resistant to Covid but, according to a New York Times report on Monday, more are going to hospital now than at the start of the pandemic.
At the end of July, “about 130 children” were admitted daily to American hospitals with Covid-19, according to the NYT citing the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. From July 31 to August 6, that number had reached 216 children infected with the virus hospitalized daily.
It might just be a slight increase in a country of over 300 million people, but the nature of the viral spread is often explosive. So while an increase of around 90% in early August may not seem like much, weeks and weeks of a 90% increase can add up quickly, even in a country as large as the United States. United.
Fortunately, only about 1% of children infected with the virus end up being hospitalized and 0.01% die, according to data from the AAP.
Health experts have repeatedly said schools are safe, especially with the masking. But not all neighborhoods require masks. While LA Unified will do so, the education council for neighboring Orange County recently voted to sue California Governor Gavin Newsom over the state’s mask mandate for schools. Across the country, some states have actually banned the requirement for masks in schools. Among them are infection hot spots like Texas, Florida, Arkansas, Utah, South Carolina, Iowa, and Oklahoma.
Viruses are opportunistic, and groups of unvaccinated children without masks could prove fertile ground for further spread and even mutation. Dr Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, recently warned that the virus itself could be “a few potentially distant mutations” from establishing a variant that eludes current vaccines.
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