When children are hospitalized with COVID-19 in the pediatric intensive care unit, their families face restrictions on being with their child and feelings of isolation, said Jacob Ferrin, a registered nurse at Primary Children’s Hospital .
“I’ve seen parents having to sleep in the bathroom of the room,” Ferrin said Thursday at a virtual press conference. the environment is “.
And when hospitals have a 110% capacity during the coronavirus pandemic, “there’s no way … that everything is done as well as when it’s running at 75 or 80%, where it’s designed to work,” he said. say Dr. Andrew Pavia, who joined Ferrin and is head of the pediatric infectious disease division at the University of Utah Health and director of hospital epidemiology at Intermountain Primary Children’s Hospital.
“He hates us for saying that,” Pavia said, predicting he would probably receive an email from a hospital administrator scolding him for that comment. “But,” he said, “that’s the truth.”
“Everyone has to admit it,” according to Pavia. “The fact that our hospitals are overcrowded is a patient safety issue.”
As COVID-19 cases “increase dramatically” in Utah, “the proportion of cases in children increases even faster,” according to Pavia.
This can be largely avoided, Pavia said, if people do two things: get vaccinated and wear a mask.
COVID-19 cases in children “are not trivial”
“We’re not doing as well as we should be in Utah,” Pavia said, in terms of adult vaccination.
New data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show that the more adults are vaccinated in a state, he said, the lower the proportion of COVID-19 cases there are in children.
“Utah is neither the best nor the worst,” Pavia said. “We’re a little in the lower third about the vaccination rate, and in the first third for infections in children.”
Across the country, 250,000 children were infected with COVID-19 last week, “more than at any other time during the pandemic,” according to Pavia.
“This is the result of a real change in the way we behave,” he said, “without masking in schools. We don’t wear masks in public.”
According to Pavia, children can go to school safely, “but they really need everyone in the classroom masked for it to work.”
Pavia said he and other health care providers take it “very personally when people tell us [masking] it doesn’t work, or that the masks are a personal choice, like putting on a traffic light … or smoking in an interior space is a personal choice “.
“By not protecting children with methods that we know work, you are hurting children,” he said.
In Utah, during “the worst of last winter, about 12% of all infections were occurring in children. It’s now around 25%, “Pavia said.” One in four cases is in school-age children. And that’s even though it’s quite difficult to test your child. “
“These mild diseases” of COVID-19 in children “are not trivial, as people like to portray them,” Pavia said.
Every time a child gets sick, “that means a father stays home from work” and “other siblings are in quarantine,” he said. “It means this kid is missing a week at school” or “his classroom has to close.”
The increase in cases also affects caregivers, who have been stretched for the past 18 months, according to Pavia and Ferrin, the registered nurse in Primary Infant.
Ferrin remembers falling asleep on the couch after returning home from a shift. His wife was watching a television news segment about the coronavirus pandemic where “they sounded a blue code alarm.”
“We’re basically programmed to jump in and respond to that,” Ferrin said. So, “I jumped off the couch and was ready to respond.”
His wife was confused and Ferrin assured him he would be fine. “We are facing so many of these intense situations,” he said.
At the Pediatric ICU, “we help patients and families cope with situations that come their way in the worst days of their lives,” Ferrin said. “And since the pandemic began, we’ve seen a dramatic increase in the number of people going through the worst day of their lives.”
First Infant serves families in a very large area in the Intermountain West, he said.
“If someone lives between Denver and Los Angeles and between Phoenix and Canada, we are their last line of defense for children between a bad event and a funeral,” Ferrin said.
(Screenshot) Jacob Ferrin, a registered nurse in the pediatric intensive care unit of the Primary Children’s Hospital, speaks on Thursday, September 9, 2021, at a virtual press conference on the increase in the number of cases of COVID-19 in children in Utah and around the world. country.
Growth in Infant Primary
According to Pavia, the number of children who are very ill with COVID-19 is “becoming a big problem.” In the United States, “a record number of children” (30,000) were hospitalized last week, he said.
“At Primary Children, the number of hospitalized children continues to increase,” Pavia said. “In May, we went for weeks with almost no hospitalized children. Now we do an average of eight to twelve, with several in the ICU ”.
Some people may think “he’s not that tall,” Pavia said, but if this is “your child struggling to breathe, who has a fan to help him breathe, worry every moment in case they survive. ”
According to Ferrin, “everything hurts” for a child to have inflammation in the body due to COVID-19.
“His eyes can be very red. It hurts when you touch their arm, ”he said. “… It helped a child become positive COVID, and just rolling caused a lot of pain and discomfort.”
Whenever people “do a lot” that many children die of COVID-19 compared to adults, “I can tell you that when we lost a child last week, a teenager [from Salt Lake County], which was absolutely devastating for the staff here, “Pavia said.
Primary Children’s doctors and nurses have cared for about 100 children, about 95 of whom were Utah residents, who have had the multisystem inflammatory system, an extreme and rare condition of COVID-19, which, among other problems, “can cause harm. in the heart, “according to Pavia. A child needed an emergency cardiac survey, he said.
“Right now we’re putting two kids in a room” at Primary Children and we’re struggling to find beds in the ICU, according to Pavia. “We had to cancel major surgeries to have room in the ICU.”
All of this is not due to COVID-19, he said, but “COVID is literally straw, or the straw bullet, that is breaking the camel’s back in your healthcare system.”
(Trent Nelson | The Salt Lake Tribune) Dr. Andrew Pavia, head of pediatric infectious diseases at Salt Lake City Primary Children’s Hospital, speaks to the media in 2014.
Utah is also experiencing an increase in respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV, that affects children under five, mostly under 2, Pavia said. Cases usually increase in the winter and children are hospitalized, many in the ICU.
“Last winter … there was almost no RSV circulation as the kids stayed home and the masks were virtually universal,” he said.
Then “something we had never seen before” happened, and RSV “came back in late summer” and continued to rise.
“It’s already at a level above an average year,” Pavia said, and is aimed at “reaching one of our worst years … without, so far, any real drop in numbers.
Pavia and Ferrin said they are imploring Utahns to help alleviate the COVID-19 situation.
“If everyone owns a little bit of ownership of what they can control, it makes a big difference in the big picture,” Ferrin said.