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“I actually get a lot of calls from really desperate families who are on their minds,” said Yvonne Maldonado, a pediatrician and professor of epidemiology and public health at Stanford University School of Medicine and lead researcher at Pfizer Vaccine Testing there. “I do not have great answers. It’s frustrating and scary. “
It’s a consolation, she said, that Omicron seems to cause mild symptoms in many children so far – although it remains to be seen whether the option is really mild in all individuals or just blunted in studies at the immune level. “The probability of a child being hospitalized is well below 1 percent,” said Maldonado. “But it’s still not zero. Where we work, we have seen many children come to the hospital with respiratory failure, or at least with respiratory distress, where they need oxygen. This can be really annoying for families. And we don’t know what the long-term effects of Covid will be in adults or children. “
The increase in the number of child cases also makes it more difficult to manage return to school during the spring semester. “Our school district set a 5 percent pass rate, and in one day almost all schools reached that level,” said Kausar Rasmi Talaat, a physician and associate professor of international health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore. where she is testing the Pfizer vaccine for children under 12. “Just because of the huge number of people infected with Omicron, we are seeing a huge increase in the number of children who are also affected and hospitalized.”
Across the country, the school picture is chaotic. In the week beginning January 2, 5,409 American schools switched to distance learning on at least one day, according to tracker Burbio, which summarizes more than 80,000 K-12 calendars. Schools in Atlanta and five counties in Georgia returned to classrooms on Monday after a delayed start to the year, while schools in twin cities and suburbs were removed to protect students. In New York on Tuesday, students staged a citywide walk to protest social distancing and remote options, and in Chicago, the Teachers’ Union agreed to end a five-day walk over safety concerns. In Northern Virginia, parents said receiving applications to stand as deputies, and in Michigan – a teacher tweets for missing schools whole levels of the class of the staff.
Parents are constantly thinking about the risk, whether it is when they introduce their child to solid food, let him climb the ladder or decide whether to send him to school during a bad flu season. But thinking about the risks of Covid is a unique challenge, as official advice seems to change so often – and because, in addition to the vaccine, new treatments such as antiviral pills and monoclonal antibodies are not yet available to younger children.
“The common cold, flu, and RSV are known,” said Jennifer Shu, an Atlanta pediatrician in private practice and medical editor of the American Academy of Pediatrics’ parenting site. “We have some drugs, including antivirals, approved for the flu. While for Covid, although there are many drugs, many are not approved under the age of 12. So they’re not even an option for kids. “
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