Live – Covid-19: The slow decline continues in the hospital

Delta Variant: No more cruel forms for children

The delta variant does not cause more severe cases of Covid-19 in children and teens than the other variants, according to the first data released Friday by US health authorities. The Centers for Disease Prevention and Control (CDC), the country’s leading federal public health agency, studied data from patients who were hospitalized for Covid-19 across 99 counties in 14 states, covering about 10% of the American population.

In particular, the agency compared the period from early March to mid-June with the period from mid-June to late July, when the delta variant became dominant in the United States. Between these two periods, the rate of hospitalization among children and adolescents aged 0 to 17 years increased fivefold. But the “proportion of children and adolescents hospitalized with serious illness,” for example with admission to intensive care, “was similar before and during the period when delta was dominant.”

In detail, of the 3,116 children and adolescents who were hospitalized in the three and a half months before Delta, about 26% were admitted to intensive care, 6% were put on a ventilator, and less than 1% died. After Delta, of the 164 hospitalizations recorded in a month and a half, about 23% were admitted to intensive care, 10% were on a ventilator, and less than 2% died. Thus the differences between the two periods are not statistically significant.