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The Impact of COVID-19 on Children’s Health in Colombia: Risks and Vaccination Efforts

The pandemic seems like a distant chapter in human life. What was the daily bread between 2020 and 2021, today is quite separated from reality. Masks, confinement, coronavirus and distancing seem to be things of the past.

Health measures, together with the contribution of citizens and the efforts of medical services, were the pillars to overcome the pandemic. Vaccination is the result of this, which reached a large part of the country’s population.

However, there are still ravages of the covid-19 present in Colombia. Although they are not of the same magnitude as in the past, there are still significant obstacles in this matter. Specifically, there are some risks regarding minors who are not vaccinated and more so when cases of virus variants have been reported.

The coronavirus remains a major issue. | Photo: Royalty Free

The complications that can be generated by the coronavirus go beyond an acute infection of the respiratory tract, since hospitalizations are more frequent in young children. In addition, and according to the figures of international bodies, the deaths caused by this condition are higher in boys and girls under one year of age than in any other pediatric group.

This panorama is worldwide, so much so that the United Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef) launched a worrying alarm about this situation. The reason is that one in five children has not received all the vaccinations to face the disease, which means that they continue to be a population at high risk.

Currently, many minors do not have the full vaccination schedule. | Photo: Getty Images

This translates into a daily threat that the child population is going through, since their immune system cannot cope with the different complications generated by the virus, being up to 5 times more likely to be hospitalized and up to 10 times more vulnerable to die the same

On the other hand, family infection is another complication associated with lack of vaccination. When minors do not have the scheme, the prolonged development of the virus can easily spread to their family nucleus and thus extend a chain of cases, some with symptoms and others asymptomatic.

Minors may be left with long-term consequences from covid-19. | Photo: Week

Some children with this disease can have negative effects on the development of their immune system, which is characterized by producing uncontrolled inflammation throughout the body that may require hospitalization in intensive care units.

Taking this context into account, the Ministry of Health in Colombia got down to work and authorized on June 21 the Moderna vaccine in minors who are in the age group of six months to eleven months with 29 days.

2023-09-06 21:26:46
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