As the school year begins for U.S. districts, cases of COVID-19 for children increase, with about 204,000 cases added last week. According to the American Academy of Pediatrics, the week ending August 26, children accounted for 22.4% of weekly COVID-19 cases.
Although cases of childhood COVID-19 decreased in early summer, “they have increased exponentially,” with an increase more than five times in the last month, according to the academy. The United States saw child cases rise from about 38,000 last week ending July 22 to more than 200,000 last week.
The infant COVID-19 case rate last week was well above average throughout the pandemic. Since the pandemic began, children accounted for 14.8% of all cumulative cases. In total, 4.8 million children tested positive for COVID-19 and the new variants present a higher risk for children, most of whom are is not yet eligible for COVID-19 vaccines.
The academy collected COVID-19 data from 49 states, New York City, Puerto Rico and Guam. Overall, the infant COVID-19 case rate in the U.S. as of August 26 was 6,374 cases per 100,000 children in the population, according to the group.
Twenty states reported more than 8,000 cases per 100,000. According to the data, Tennessee, South Carolina, Rhode Island, North Dakota, Arkansas and Mississippi had the highest case rates per 100,000 children.
Cases are on the rise again across the country, which means there is also an increase in hospitalizations of all demographic ages, said Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, Dr. Rochelle Walensky.
“But because the absolute number of cases is so high, the absolute number of children entering the hospital is high. It is also the case that we are currently also in a wave of cases of RSV, cases of respiratory syncytial virus “. Walensky said. “We’re seeing RSV rates similar to those we generally see during the winter months.”
Because of the “highly contagious Delta variant,” the CDC recommends universal masking for all students, staff, teachers and visitors to K-12 schools, regardless of vaccination status.
“I can tell you that most of the places where we see outbreaks and outbreaks are in places that do not implement our current orientation,” Walensky said, adding that it is not hospitalizations that are increasing, but the number of cases.
Because children under the age of 12 cannot yet receive the vaccine, the CDC recommends that schools use a variety of prevention strategies and continue to implement social distancing, testing, and routine hand washing in addition to masking.
There are also several school districts which requires staff to be vaccinated – Including New York City, Chicago and all of California, experts say, one way to protect children is to vaccinate the adults around them.
But some states are resisting preventative measures. The governors of Texas and Florida threatened reaction against districts that implement mask mandates in schools, but many districts do defying his orders.
The U.S. Department of Education is also investigating five Republican-led states (Iowa, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee and Utah), due to concerns that bans on its mask mandate could leave students with disabilities and the most vulnerable underlying health conditions to COVID-19, Reuters reports.
“Masks save lives and reduce COVID-19 transmission,” Dr. Leslie Diaz, an infectious disease specialist at Florida’s Jupiter Medical Center, told CBSN on Wednesday.
“Science is there, masks work and we should use them,” Diaz said. “Especially in the school district and in schools that are now flooded with all the kids coming back and not doing e-learning.”
Science shows masks work to prevent the spread of COVID-19, he said.
“We’re in a crisis. Whether you know you really want to acknowledge it or not, reality is there every day of my life. I can’t rule it out,” he said. “Wearing masks has become a very relaxed behavior around here and in the United States. It shouldn’t be.”
Dr Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, said when children are eligible for vaccines, schools should force them. “I think ordering vaccines for kids to show up at school is a good idea,” Fauci told CNN’s Jake Tapper on Sunday’s “State of the Union.” “We’ve done it for decades and decades, requiring polio, measles, mumps, rubella, hepatitis [vaccinations.]”
Fauci also said this week that vaccines are likely to be available to children during the holiday season, Reuters reports.
Although serious diseases due to COVID-19 are still uncommon among children, “there is an urgent need to collect more data on the long-term impacts of the pandemic on children, including the ways in which the virus can harming the long-term physical health of infected children, as well as their emotional and mental health effects, ”says the academy.