More and more hospitalizations of children with COVID-19. Why is this happening?

The omicron differs in many ways from previous coronavirus variants. What has not been observed on such a large scale before are, among others more and more symptomatic infections and pediatric hospitalizations. Why do children get sick, and badly, more often than at the beginning of a pandemic?

1. In many countries, there is an increase in the number of infections and hospitalization of children infected with the coronavirus
2. This is a big change from previous pandemic waves, which raises the question of why Omikron poses a particular risk to the youngest patients
3. The reasons for this include not only the low vaccination rate in people under 18 years of age, but also the nature of the variant itself, which more often affects the upper respiratory tract. These in children are very narrow and become blocked quickly
4. Scientists also believe that the innate immune system, which is stronger in children than in adults, copes with the coronavirus much worse than a year or two ago. The cause may be a mutation in the virus that weakens this immune response
5. More information can be found on the Onet homepage

Children also get sick and go to hospital because of COVID-19

One of the comforting news about the coronavirus so far has been the fact that SARS-CoV-2 seemed less dangerous for children than for adults. At the beginning of the pandemic, symptoms of infection were rarely seen in children, although they could transmit the virus to others. Therefore, during the first lockdown, schools, kindergartens and nurseries were closed as places where there was an increased exchange of microorganisms between children, able to bring them home and infect the elderly, especially at risk of severe COVID-19.

Read: Patricia, suffering from COVID-19, gave birth to a baby girl. She didn’t even hug her

This has not changed over time. Children suffered symptomatically more often, and thus – the number of hospitalizations increased. Why? Previous variants of the coronavirus attacked the lower respiratory tract to a large extent, and these types of infections in children develop at an express pace (often “clean” when auscultated by a doctor, after a few hours the child goes to the hospital with pneumonia) and may end tragically. A stay in a hospital, under constant observation of specialists, was and is therefore in most cases a necessity.

As Omikron spread around the world and it turned out that it most likely causes a milder course of COVID-19, many parents breathed a sigh of relief. Unfortunately, this peace did not last long. Quick it turned out that children get sick much more often than before, and the number of pediatric hospitalizations is not only not decreasing, but on the contrary – it is growing.

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The American Academy of Pediatrics report shows that the number of pediatric covid cases is growing at a tremendous pace. Of the nearly 9,5 million children who have been diagnosed with coronavirus since the start of the pandemic, nearly 20 percent. was diagnosed in the first two weeks of January 2022, i.e. during the Omicron wave.

A similar situation occurs in Great Britain, where there is an increase in the number of hospitalized infants. Data from the Isaric / Co-CIN study, published by the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies and based on a broadly representative subset of NHS hospitals, shows how these statistics have changed from previous waves.

1. Read: A five-year-old broke the quarantine. The policemen had no mercy

Between mid-December 2021 and mid-January this year, 42 percent. children with COVID-19 in hospitals were infants under the age of 1. In previous COVID-19 waves, this percentage was around 30%. While the data does not show whether the children were previously hospitalized with an infection, or COVID-19 was detected in the hospital “by the way”, during the Omicron wave, experts have no doubt that children’s hospitalizations are directly related to coronavirus infection.

We do not have such detailed data in Poland, but there are also more and more infections and hospitalizations of children with COVID-19. The Government Information Center, which runs a Twitter profile on vaccines, recently reported that more than 800 children had been detected in children. symptomatic courses of COVID-19, and 9 thousand. Because of this, 611 children had to be hospitalized.

1. How many children in Poland died from COVID-19? “It’s a lot”

Why does coronavirus attack children more than at the start of the pandemic?

There are several reasons for this. First, most children are unvaccinated, and the virus “looks” in particular for people who are unable to defend themselves against it with antibodies, created either as a result of disease or vaccination (the best is, according to research, their combination – the so-called hybrid immunity).

Some children are not yet in the COVID-19 immunization program. This is the case of children under the age of 5, because no manufacturer of vaccines protecting against the coronavirus has yet successfully completed research on the effectiveness of the preparation in this age group. But in many countries also older children cannot be vaccinated – this is the case in Great Britain, where only 12-year-olds can get vaccinated.

1. Check it out: How do I enroll my 5-11 year old child for COVID-19 vaccination?

But even where vaccination of even small children is possible, there are not many people willing.

Secondly, Omikron is extremely contagious, so it infects children much more easily.

We call it the phenomenon in the nominative case. The hospitalization rate is calculated by dividing the number of hospitalizations – numerator – by the number of known cases – denominator. If the denominator becomes a larger number, so will the numerator

Susan Coffin, an infectious disease specialist at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia told scientificamerican.com.

A third reason for the increased number of children who become ill and hospitalized for COVID-19 may be the nature of the Omikron variant itself, which “prefers” the upper rather than the lower respiratory tract. In children, they are narrow, small in size, so they block faster and become clogged. This is why one of the most common symptoms of coronavirus (especially the Omikron variant) in children is a stuffy nose and a barking cough that resembles the symptom of a croup.

1. Read also: A new symptom of Omicron in children. It’s like croup

This issue was investigated by Rong Xu from the American Case Western Reserve University, who analyzed the medical data of almost 80. children under five who were diagnosed with COVID-19 before the appearance of the new variant and after Omicron detection. The researcher found that the risk of hospitalization in children during the Omicron wave was one-third of that risk during the dominance of the Delta variant. According to Xu, the principle is simple: the more children infected, the more they end up in the hospitalbecause “the risk of hospitalization is not zero”.

You can find the rest of the text under the video.

Omicron in children. A child’s immune system reacts differently to that of an adult

There is another important scientific discovery that may answer the question of why children get COVID-19 today and are hospitalized more often than in the earlier stages of the pandemic.

In the first waves of the pandemic, children coped better than adults with the coronavirus because they have a stronger innate immune system. In this case, the most important role is played by proteins (cytokines) called interferons and interleukins, which are able to even “crush” the coronavirus at a very early stage of infection.

1. Read also: If your child has these symptoms, get tested for COVID-19

In adults, on the other hand, the adaptive immune system works better, which can cope better with an already ongoing infection. This means that the child’s immune system fights the virus more effectively, protecting the body against infection or destroying the pathogen at the very beginning of the infection, while an adult, although not always able to defend himself against infection, has a chance to cope better with the disease itself.

These findings were made in the early stages of the pandemic, as coronavirus research was just in its infancy and both adults and children were starting to fight SARS-CoV-2 on a ‘clean slate’. After two years (and several new variants of the virus), scientists don’t have such good news.

Researchers from the Quantitative Biosciences Institute at the University of California, San Francisco recently discovered a mutation in the coronavirus responsible for the weakening of the innate immune response. Interestingly, it was identified in all three analyzed variants: Alfie, Delta and Omikronthus, the mutation itself cannot be fully responsible for fluctuations in pediatric hospitalizations. So where did the increases observed in the statistics come from?

My hunch is that my innate immune system is still strong. But if you have a lot of virus in your body, no matter how good your innate response is, sometimes it just wins.

Said Betsy Herold, pediatrician and infectious disease specialist at Albert Einstein College of Medicine.

Omicron multiplies in the body faster than Delta

The assumptions of the New York researcher are confirmed by the preliminary findings of her Hong Kong colleagues. At the university there, it was discovered that The omicron replicates (multiplies) in the human airways 70 times faster than Delta.

The same studies and many others conducted on animals have shown that this variant is more difficult to reproduce in lung tissue, which would explain why it is less likely to cause severe COVID-19.

However, as the molecular biologist Mehdi Bouhaddou, who co-directed the research in San Francisco, points out, while viruses tend to evolve to become less threatening over time, “this evolutionary journey into a more portable but milder version, while expected, is by no means guaranteed.”

Parents of children and teenagers must therefore be extremely vigilant and not underestimate any symptoms of infection in their children. COVID-19 can be tricky, and complications after it, especially when it has not been diagnosed, can be severe.

1. Also read: Surprising and serious complications in children who have had COVID-19 asymptomatically

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