For Texas children, COVID-19 hospitalizations exceed vaccinations

There’s a small list of things Richmond, Texas, mom Vanessa Lui promised her daughter Zoe they could do after the third-grader got her COVID-19 shot.

A visit to Barnes & Noble. An afternoon at the local museum.

Going back to school in person is also on the list, but schoolwork isn’t really what Zoe misses after attending school entirely online for the past year and a half.

“I only miss my friends, because I don’t really like working, it’s kind of boring,” the 8-year-old told the Texas Tribune in an interview. “Sometimes we would play at recess and go down the slide.”

That’s why, in November, she was among the first Texas kids in her age group to roll up her sleeves and get the COVID-19 shot, appearing with her mother, aunt and cousin at Texas Children’s. Hospital in Houston after the federal government shutdown approved the Pfizer vaccine for children ages 5 to 11.

Since then, 693,345 elementary-age children in Texas have received at least one dose of the vaccine, which is about 24% of the state’s 2.9 million children aged 5 to 11 – and a figure consistent at the national rate. Nearly 390,000 of the 5-11 group are fully vaccinated, while more than half of Texans between the ages of 12 and 15 are fully vaccinated.

The childhood vaccination rate in Texas is higher than in many other Southern states, where rates as low as 10% are recorded. In the first two weeks after the vaccine was approved for emergency use in the younger age group, some 100,000 children showed up at Texas school clinics, pharmacies and pediatricians’ offices for get vaccinated.

Zoe was among them.

“As a family, we were excited,” Lui said. “We need more parents, rather than fewer parents, to come first.”

But as the omicron variant of COVID-19 increases cases beyond anything recorded in Texas during the pandemic, Zoe is still waiting to return to school. She continues to take her classes online while she and her mother wait for staff members to stop calling in sick, which forces students to change teachers and classes often.

With omicron raging in the unvaccinated community, children with COVID-19 are showing up in hospitals and pediatricians’ offices in record numbers.

Some pediatricians had to close for a few days because most of their staff were sick, forcing parents to change appointments or seek new family doctors for common winter illnesses such as the flu or other non-COVID infections.

“They called us and said, ‘We have to cancel your meeting today. No staff can do that,” said Houston communications professional Evan Mintz, who had to reschedule an appointment for his young daughter over the holidays. “It was a day late, and that’s not bad in the grand scheme of things. But nevertheless, it was a shock for us. It affected us directly.

Frisco pediatrician Seth Kaplan managed to stay open but had to temporarily stop accepting new patients, he said.

“It just has to be overwhelming,” he said.

Omicron strikes just as children get vaccines

At Texas Children’s Hospital in Houston, positive cases among patients rose from zero in early December to some 70 patients with COVID-19 a month later, mostly among unvaccinated children, said Dr. Jim Versalovic, chief pathologist. of the hospital. Their hospitalizations of children with COVID-19 broke all previous pandemic records, and at breakneck speed, he said. Just weeks after omicron was first detected in Texas, it was causing more than 90% of new cases appearing in his hospital – less than a month after the vaccine was approved for young children.

“We have staggering numbers here during this omicron push,” Versalovic told a news conference in early January.

On the same day, the state broke its own record for children hospitalized with COVID-19, reporting 350 — five more than the previous peak a few months earlier.

On Friday, the state health department released data on 3.8 million confirmed cases of COVID-19 in Texas during the first two years of the pandemic. Nearly 19% of them – 722,393 – were diagnosed in residents under the age of 20. Population data does not include cases reported in 2022.

During the first week of January, the Texas Department of State Health Services and the Texas Education Agency reported that approximately 26,500 students and 11,800 staff had been infected with COVID, according to data released Friday.

As student case numbers approach levels not seen since school began last fall, there are more COVID-19 cases among staff than at any other time during the pandemic. The numbers are likely to rise as more districts report their numbers to the state. The current numbers only include about half of all 1,200 districts in the state, and the number of districts reporting numbers is inconsistent from week to week.

Meanwhile, on Wednesday, the state reported 471 children in Texas hospitals with COVID-19. Most of them are unvaccinated, hospital officials said. But there is no state data detailing the number of children with COVID-19 in pediatric intensive care units in Texas.

Versalovic said fewer of his COVID-19 patients in the 5-11 age group end up in the intensive care unit, compared to previous outbreaks, because they can be vaccinated.

Children under 5, who are not yet eligible to be vaccinated, are still going to intensive care at similar rates to previous surges, he said. One in 3 of Texas Children’s COVID-19 patient hospitalizations were under the age of 5, Versalovic said.

They present with serious lung infections, similar to those they might contract with respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV, a more common childhood respiratory illness.

Versolavic cautioned against the assumption that omicron is less severe for children, even though it appears to be less severe than delta for adults.

“It’s something we’re going to watch very closely,” he said. “We have no solid evidence that the disease is more serious [in children] with omicron than with delta, at this stage. … But we can’t say that it’s sweeter for children because it’s, frankly, precocious. And we just need time to continue to follow these children and see.

More intensive care beds are available now for all young patients than there were a few months ago, in part because the state is no longer in an unusual, simultaneous surge of RSV and influenza. , as was observed over the summer, so these patients are not using as many beds, Versalovic said.

A portion of children hospitalized during the COVID-19 census tested positive for the virus during routine screening after presenting to hospital for something else, Versalovic said, but identifying the difference can be complicated. when comorbidities are involved.

The state does not require hospitals to report which cases are caused by COVID-19 and which are incidental and not the reason the person is hospitalized.

“What I can say is that when we look at the real-time data, it’s clear that the majority of cases either have COVID-19 as a primary factor or a significant contributing factor to their hospitalization,” a- he declared. “Having said that, of course, we’re going to have to keep looking at that to see if we can get any firmer numbers on that.”

Less serious cases

There are encouraging notes this time around, Versalovic said.

“We’ve learned a lot during this pandemic, and we’re in a much better position in January compared to last January with vaccinations,” he said.

The possibility of omicron being less severe than its predecessors is preventing children from being vaccinated, as their parents feel that their children may not need to be vaccinated right away, says expert Dr Peter Hotez. in vaccines and a virologist at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. .

It’s a notion that puts children at real risk of long-term complications from COVID-19.

Recent studies from London show that 1 in 7 children with COVID have severe or chronic symptoms of long duration, known as “long COVID”. A more recent Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study pointed to an increased risk of diabetes in infected children.

“Parents don’t rush to get their young children vaccinated,” Hotez said. “I think the problem is that the federal government and certainly the state government have not adequately explained why children need to be vaccinated. I think people focus a lot on low mortality numbers, but the way I see it is that mortality is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to pediatric illnesses with COVID.

Zoe Lui, for her part, said she is proud to do what she can, as a young person, to protect herself and her community. And her mom is proud of her.

“I just had this theme, ‘It’s your picture,’ going through my head the whole time she was getting it,” Vanessa Lui said. “It was sweet. It was really cute.

Kaplan, the Frisco pediatrician, said while vaccine numbers may be higher in children, he hopes it will improve.

“I have never heard so many ‘thanks’ as in the past few weeks,” he said. “They really feel a huge, palpable relief to finally be able to do this for their children.”

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2022/01/14/texas-covid-19-children-hospitalizations/.

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