The pandemic is changing. What we knew a year ago is
different now.
Here’s some of the latest.
This disease is now driven by the unvaccinated population.
The unvaccinated are a minority of the population, but they dominate both all
illness and severe illness requiring hospitalization.
An August 2021 study by the Centers for Disease Control of
health care facilities in Los Angeles found that if you were unvaccinated, you were
5 times more likely to get the disease and 29 times more likely
to require hospitalization for COVID.
Young people seemed somewhat protected from the early
strains of the virus, but that is changing.
“Rates of COVID-19–associated hospitalization among children
and adolescents increased rapidly from late June to mid-August 2021, coinciding
with predominance of the Delta variant,” the CDC reported.
(Children aged 12 to 17 are eligible for vaccination.
Children 11 and younger are not currently eligible.)
Children are getting sick at higher rates than they were
early in the epidemic, and unvaccinated kids are getting far sicker. Unvaccinated
teenagers are 10 times more likely than those vaccinated to require
hospitalization.
Among kids aged 0 to 17, “Emergency department visits and
hospital admissions in a 2-week period in August 2021 were higher in states
with lower population vaccination coverage and lower in states with higher
vaccination coverage,” the CDC said.
The changing dominant variant has changed the behavior of
the pandemic. Where children were not particularly likely to get the Alpha variant,
they seem more likely to get the Delta variant.
“Weekly rates of COVID-19-associated hospitalizations per
100,000 children and adolescents younger than 18 years old increased nearly
five-fold, from 0.3 during the week ending June 26, 2021, to 1.4 during the
week ending August 14, 2021,” the CDC said.
The data shows that among children, the youngest children
are at increased risk.
“The sharpest increase during this period occurred among
children aged 0-4 years, for whom the rate per 100,000 children during the week
ending August 14, 2021 (1.9) was nearly 10 times that during the week ending
June 26, 2021,” said the CDC.
© Jan TenBruggencate 2021
Saw that Ron Wiley shared this. Delta has been especially hard on children here. Of the 327 cases for children, almost 90% (291) have been since the arrival of Delta in mid-June.
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