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Children’s hospitals across the country are overwhelmed by COVID-19 cases as the Delta variant continues to surge and schools reopen.
Approximately 1,600 children infected with COVID-19 were hospitalized last week, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Public Health officials warn that the number of infections will rise in the coming weeks.
“We’ve got problems pretty uniformly everywhere,” Mark Wietecha, CEO of the Children’s Hospital Association, said. ” Most of our children’s hospital intensive care units, if they’re not near capacity, they’re at capacity. We have kids in the emergency department on gurneys.”
“We’re crowded in New York; we’re crowded in Chicago; we’re crowded in Denver, Los Angeles, Houston, Texas, Miami. You can go right around the horn,” Wietecha said. “They are full, every bed, and we normally don’t have that in August.”
Dr. Mary Taylor, the pediatrics chair at Children’s of Mississippi, told Politico that between 13 and 16 children are being admitted into the hospital at any given time.
“It’s misleading because during the first go round, there were children with zero symptoms,” the pediatrics chair said. “Now, they are most symptomatic and are at far greater risk of spreading it and they seem to be getting sicker.”
Dr. Taylor suggests that people should stop assuming that the Delta variant is not a threat to children — especially, children that are back in school.
In the past two months, Republican-led states across the country have enacted laws to ban vaccine mandates and mask requirements.
The American Academy of Pediatrics says that the number of new infections in children has doubled between the end of July and now.
“When it comes to hospitalizations right now, about 19 percent of our cases are adolescents, which is higher than it was when the first version of the virus came through,” Arkansas Republican Governor Asa Hutchinson, who passed legislation to ban masks mandates, said. “That increase in cases among adolescents is a concern, because it just takes a few more hospitalizations to really make it challenging for our children’s hospitals to provide adequate care.”
“We’re all holding our breath as school starts because we know schools can be a place where respiratory viruses take off like wildfire,” Buddy Creech, chair in the Pediatrics Department of Vanderbilt University Medical Center, said.
Hospitals, medical organizations, and teacher’s unions are pushing to get legislation passed to protect school-aged children from the COVID-19 virus. School board officials across the country are taking matters into their own hands and overriding legislation prohibiting mask mandates in schools.
“There is no need to require masks in schools at this time,” South Carolina Governor Henry McMaster said on Monday.
A poll conducted by the Keiser Family Foundation reveals that 20 percent of parents and 40 percent of Republican parents say they will not vaccinate their children who are old enough to get the COVID-19 vaccine.
“We don’t have enough caregivers or beds,” Wietecha said. “We just don’t have surge capacity, as you can see right now. We will not fix that overnight, but unless we get started, we will never fix it.”
