Kali Cook was four years old when she died after hiring Covid-19 last week in Galveston County, Texas, becoming the youngest resident in the county to die of the disease.
“She was so funny and cheeky,” her mother, Karra Harwood, told The Galveston County Daily News of the girl who enjoyed playing with frogs and worms. “She was so pretty and full of life.”
According to her family, Kali had no previously diagnosed health issues and a doctor found she was in good health recently, Dr. Philip Keizer, a local health authority in Galveston County, told NBC News. She began to develop respiratory symptoms after other family members became ill with Covid and found her dead the next morning. An autopsy is performed.
Keizer said Kali’s death was “really shocking,” but it shouldn’t have been, as 40 percent of the county’s cases are people under the age of 20 and the largest demographic population is under the age of 10. .
“It simply came to our notice then. How could this happen? Why could this happen? “He said.” But somehow, again when you take a step back and see how the delta can spread very quickly and children are now one of the largest unvaccinated groups in the country, we shouldn’t be surprised , although it was quite shocking “.
As of Sept. 9, about 5.3 million children had been diagnosed with Covid-19, 15.5 percent of all cases, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics. More than 243,000 cases were reported Sept. 2-9, the second-highest number of child cases in a week since the pandemic began, accounting for nearly 29 percent of cases reported weekly, according to the AAP. The highest number of cases was just one week earlier, with 251,781 new cases. The AAP reported that, after declining in early summer, “cases of children have increased exponentially, with almost 500,000 cases in the last 2 weeks.”
Despite the outbreak of cases, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and pediatric specialists and clinical researchers studying the disease still have no evidence that the delta causes more serious infections in children and adolescents.
But experts are examining “red flags that could indicate a greater severity of the disease in specific segments of the pediatric population,” said Dr. Jim Versalovic, the acting chief pediatrician at Texas Children’s Hospital.
“For example, we see Covid pneumonia and acute respiratory distress in infants and young children,” Versalovic said, adding that some cases are due to co-infections with respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) and covides with a higher hospitalization rate.
“Therefore, it can be difficult to understand if we have more serious illnesses due to delta or coinfections,” he said.
A definitive answer could still be months away, Versalovic said, though he hopes there will be “more clarity on this issue during the 2021 calendar year.”
“We need more time to evaluate data across regions, age groups, different underlying medical conditions, and long-term outcomes,” he said.
“These questions can be difficult and keep in mind that this increase in the delta is only two months old,” he said. “We can safely state that the greatest impact of the delta on children is simply a larger number of cases or a much larger number of children with Covid.”
An average of 341 new Covid patients aged 17 and under were admitted to hospitals for the week of Sept. 6-12, slightly down from the recent high of 371 newspapers from Aug. 29 to Sept. 4, according to data. available from the CDC. According to the data, more than 57,300 children have been admitted to hospitals since August 1.
And at least 412 children have died from Covid, according to the latest CDC data, although serious complications in children remain rare.
Dr. Sean O’Leary, vice chair of the infectious disease committee at the American Academy of Pediatrics, said that while the question of whether the virus is more severe for children is important, “it’s not as important as how many children, frankly, are getting infected and hospitalized right now. ”
“We still don’t really have an answer to this question from adult illness, where there are at least many more hospitalizations than children’s, so I think it’s going to be a difficult question to answer.”
This month, the CDC found in two studies that pediatric hospitalizations increased “nearly fivefold in late June-mid-August 2021,” according to one study. This study also found that hospitalization rates were “10 times higher among unvaccinated than among fully vaccinated adolescents.”
Studies did not find evidence that the delta variant appeared to cause more serious illness in children, but the large number of children exposed to it led to an increase in children hospitalized with Covid.
Whether the delta itself is more severe or not, doctors say they are seeing more cases of children falling seriously ill as the pandemic has progressed and the delta variant has become predominant.
Dr. Inci Yildirim, a pediatric infectious disease specialist at Yale Medicine, said it was very uncommon before the pandemic to see “a teenager who was intubated for days in the ICU. But now, as more children become infected, there are more hospitalized children. ”
“This is the first time I’ve seen many pediatric patients with Covid-19 in the hospital,” he said. “That wasn’t the case 8-10 months ago.”
Yildirim said Covid is a milder disease in children than in adults, “but it is not a mild disease in childhood, when hundreds of children are dying.”
Dr. Claudette Poole, a pediatric infectious disease doctor at Children’s Hospital of Alabama, said the hospital has been testing Covid on all children admitted since the spring of last year.
When he looked at how the virus manifested in children in August 2020, about 44 percent were totally asymptomatic, he said. Now, only 10 percent of children are asymptomatic, he said.
Poole said this seemed to show that the delta could be more likely to cause real symptoms in children than previous variants.
But he also said a lot is different now at this time of year compared to the same time last year.
“A year ago there was a much more remote learning, a year ago we had much stricter mitigation measures than now,” he said. “So it’s a combination of fewer mitigation measures and certainly a more transmissible virus compared to what we treated last year, and it seems to be more likely to cause symptomatic illness than the previous variant, so which is like a triple blow if you did. “
Poole said it was important for people to know that Covid can cause serious illness in children, even if it is rarer than in adults.
“We certainly see kids ending up in the ICU in numbers we hadn’t experienced before in the pandemic,” he said. “And when I say the level of ICU care, I mean they get sick desperately.”
“It is alarming for us that many children are sick and need care at the hospital level,” he said.