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Two of the states most infectious with the delta variant of COVID-19, Louisiana and Florida, are seeing increased numbers of sick children.
It is not known why more children are sick due to the delta variant outbreak, but medical experts believe the increase in pediatric cases is due to the variant. hypertransmissibility – how easy it is for the virus to circulate in an unvaccinated population.
Young children are not yet eligible for the vaccine.
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In New Orleans, 20 children in two weeks contracted severe cases of the delta variant, NBC News reported, and it appears to have been more contagious than the previous outbreak.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Mark Kline, chief medical officer at Children’s Hospital New Orleans, told NBC News. “We are seeing children getting sick that we just didn’t see in the first year of the pandemic, before the delta variant arrived.”
In Orlando, doctors at Arnold Palmer Hospital have seen record cases in children, and they are cautious about what will happen.
“In the past two weeks, cases have continued to increase,” Federico Laham, the hospital’s medical director, told NBC. “I don’t think we’ve reached our peak.”
Like Change America Previously reported, the coronavirus is accelerating in the United States, but each state varies based on the percentage of people vaccinated – a factor in resistance to the delta variant, according to a new study.
By calculating the case acceleration rates, the journalist behind the latest STAT analysis found that Louisiana and Florida both lead the states in quick cases.
While cases in children are increasing at an alarming rate, it is not confirmed that the delta variant is more dangerous in children than in adults, said Laham and other pediatric infectious disease experts across the country. National to NBC News.
“It’s too early to tell,” Bernhard Wiedermann, infectious disease specialist at Children’s National Hospital in Washington, DC, told NBC News. “It will take time and data collection from multiple sites to find out” if the delta is more virulent in children than previous strains of the virus.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is trying to determine whether the delta variant may be a more serious disease in children, Rochelle Walensky, director of the CDC, said in a briefing Thursday.
Walensky noted that researching the correlation between the increase in the number of child cases and the easing of restrictions makes things more complicated, saying, “The mitigation strategies that were used last summer, even in winter, haven’t been used in many of those areas where we have decent pushes. now.”
“The reason more children are getting sick is simply because more children are getting sick,” said Paul Offit, vaccine researcher at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. “It’s clearly increased contagiousness, not increased virulence.”
Since the start of the pandemic, more than 4.1 million children have been diagnosed with COVID-19, or 14.3% of all cases. Now, children with COVID-19 account for 19% of cases reported weekly from July 15 to July 29, according to the latest data from the American Academy of Pediatrics.
“In the first year of this pandemic, the myth existed that children never got very sick from COVID-19,” Kline said.
Because the delta variant is so contagious, he said, the increase in cases clearly shows the potential of the virus, even in otherwise healthy young children.
“This delta variant is an infectious disease specialist’s worst nightmare,” Kline said.
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