Children and COVID: Does Latest Increase in Cases Suggest Stabilization?
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New COVID-19 instances rose for the 2nd time in 3 months, as the effort and hard work to vaccinate the youngest little ones continued to gradual immediately after just 3 full weeks.
Nationally, over 75,000 young children below age 5 a long time received their initial dose of COVID-19 vaccine for the duration of the week of July 7-13. That quantity is down from the previous week — 118,000 from June 30 to July 6 — which, in flip, was lower than the 206,000 doses administered through the initially 10 days immediately after acceptance, based on data from the Facilities for Disease Regulate and Prevention. That all adds up to just underneath 400,000 vaccinated children, or 2% of the suitable populace below age 5, as of July 13.
State-amount details, in the meantime, display sizeable variation, the American Academy of Pediatrics famous in its weekly evaluation of the CDC vaccine facts. Vermont has now vaccinated 10.% of young children beneath age 5 years, and Massachusetts is at 9.5%, although Mississippi (.3%), Alabama (.5%), and Louisiana (.8%) are however under 1%, the AAP stated.
New Cases Present Signals of Steadying
The national depend was up by 11.1% for the week of July 8-14, rising to 75,000 new instances, in comparison with 68,000 the preceding week, but the current trend would seem to be leaning towards steadiness. The over-all selection has been between 67,000 and 76,000 in excess of the earlier 4 weeks, alternating involving rising and slipping in that time span, in accordance to information gathered by the AAP and the Kid’s Hospital Affiliation from point out and territorial health departments.
In spite of the absence of a significant surge this summer time, though, the weekly numbers “are much larger than a person 12 months ago, July 15, 2021, when 24,000 youngster circumstances had been documented,” the two groups explained, also noting that many states have stopped updating their online dashboards above the earlier calendar year, building the present-day total artificially lower in comparison.
Taken with that grain of salt, the cumulative selection of little one scenarios considering the fact that the start off of the pandemic is just about 13.9 million, which represents 18.6% of all instances in the United States. That proportion has been declining in latest weeks and was as higher as 19.% as late as mid-May possibly. “Whilst COVID-19 circumstances are very likely significantly underreported for all age groups, this decline implies that small children are disproportionately undercounted in documented COVID-19 situations,” the AAP and CHA explained.
This post originally appeared on MDedge.com, aspect of the Medscape Expert Network.