But it’d be foolish to think ‘oh hey there’s a big spike in pediatric hospitalizations right now and a bunch of them are testing positive for covid, maybe covid is unrelated’.
Covid in kids is tricky. It rarely causes the respiratory issues classic in adults. What it does cause is bronchiolitis and asthma exacerbations, diarrhea, refusals to eat maybe cause taste is gone.
How you code these types of encounters is going to make a big difference.
The last covid+ kid I admitted was admitted for dehydration. Kiddo had a bunch of diarrhea and wasn’t eating/drinking. Came to me lethargic and severely dehydrated. Covid+. The reason for admission was dehydration. It wasn’t covid. But covid caused that dehydration.
This preprint illustrates some of the differences between kids and adults:
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.21.21268108v1
Length of hospital stay was short (mean 3.2 days), and in 44% COVID-19 was the primary diagnosis. Most children received standard ward care (92%), with 31 (25%) receiving oxygen therapy. Seven children (6%) were ventilated; four children died, all related to complex underlying co-pathologies. All children and majority of parents for whom data were available were unvaccinated.
25% is insanely low for o2 therapy. For adults its 90%+ I’m sure. But the kid with T1DM who gets admitted with DKA, his primary process isn’t the covid, but covid almost certainly contributed to the DKA. There’s a lot of room to fudge the numbers here and I can’t wait for some preprint to do exactly that like we’ve seen in other awful preprints.
The authors of this preprint go into this, 18.8% are cases where covid is ‘contributory’. The remaining 37% are incidentals like kids with appendicitis or whatever.
SA has a nice advantage right now, it’s summer so I don’t think they’re getting the massive amounts of RSV we’re getting right now so it should be easier.
Regardless, it’s incredibly foolish to expect that a spike in hospitalizations that coincide with covid positivity as a coincidence.
