February 24th, 2022
Maybe you heard that the Omicron variant was milder than previous versions of SARS-CoV-2. Just don’t tell that to children who are too young to receive a COVID vaccine.
The CDC reported in last week’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report that COVID-19 hospitalization rates among children under 4 years old in the U.S. were around 5 times higher during the peak of the Omicron surge compared to the peak of the Delta wave.
In fact, Omicron was worse across the pediatric spectrum. The rate of hospitalizations for children under 18 years of age was nearly 4 times higher during the Omicron surge (measured from December 19, 2021 to January 22, 2022) than during the Delta surge, which lasted longer (July 1 to December 18, 2021).
The report also indicates how valuable vaccinations are for adolescents, who were eligible to receive the Pfizer vaccine for the duration of the study period. Compared to fully vaccinated teens, 12-to-17-year-olds who were unvaccinated were 6 times more likely to be hospitalized with COVID-19 during the Omicron wave.
It’s true that children tend to have milder symptoms than their parents and grandparents suffer from COVID-19. Kids are less likely than adults to become seriously ill, require hospitalization, develop complications, and die from the infection. But every child who is diagnosed with COVID-19 can potentially get very sick and need to be hospitalized. This creates huge medical challenges for children and great stress for their families, reason enough for adults to do everything in their power to protect young people — a point the CDC stresses in the report:
All persons who are eligible for vaccination should receive and stay up to date with COVID-19 vaccines to reduce the risk for severe disease for themselves and others with whom they come into contact, including children who are currently too young to be vaccinated.
Now that Omicron is fading away and children’s hospitals are clearing out after a brutal winter surge of COVID-19, this would be a good time for vaccine-hesitant and mask-averse parents to re-examine their positions that keep children who can’t receive a vaccine unprotected and vulnerable during a deadly and hard-to-predict pandemic — a scourge that hasn’t ended yet.
