The delta variant does not cause more severe cases of Covid-19 in children and adolescents than the other variants. This is the conclusion of the first data released by US health authorities on Friday, September 3, as concerns mount in the country over a growing number of children in hospitals.
The Centers for Disease Prevention and Control (CDC), the leading federal public health agency, studied data from patients hospitalized for Covid-19 in 99 counties across 14 states, covering about 10% of the U.S. population.
Specifically, the agency compared the period from early March to mid-June with the period from mid-June to late July, when the delta variant became dominant in the United States. Between these two periods, the number of hospital admissions among children and adolescents aged 0 to 17 years has increased fivefold.
bot Percentage of children and adolescents hospitalized with serious illnessese.g. when admitted to the intensive care unit,It was similar before and during the Delta period.”.
Of the 3,116 children and adolescents hospitalized in the three and a half months before Delta, about 26% were admitted to intensive care, 6% on a ventilator, and less than 1% died. After Delta, of the 164 hospitalized admissions, about 23% were admitted to the intensive care unit in a month and a half, 10% were on a ventilator, and less than 2% died. The differences between the two periods are therefore not statistically significant.
However, the CDC notes that the number of children with severe cases of the disease was small between mid-June and late July, limiting the importance of the comparisons made. They emphasize that the data should continue to be closely monitored in the future.
This work also shows that vaccines still protect adolescents well against delta: the number of hospital admissions was about ten times higher for unvaccinated adolescents than for those vaccinated during the delta control period. In the United States, teens as young as 12 can receive Pfizer injections.
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