Covid USA: Hospitalizations among young children increased fivefold from Delta’s peak to Omicron

According to a report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the number of US children under the age of four admitted to hospital with COVID-19 was five times greater than at the Omicron peak compared to the Delta peak.

The study, published by the agency on Tuesday, found that babies aged zero to six months were most affected by Omicron, with about 60 per 100,000 hospitalized with Covid at the height of the highly contagious strain.

While hospitalization data is often misleading as it includes people who were being treated for another condition and tested positive while there, the CDC reports that 85 percent of hospitalizations in the study had Covid as the root cause.

The data in this report may be shocking, but the number of children hospitalized with Covid – even at its peak – is still lower than adults.

According to the wide variety of evidence, it is also extremely unlikely that children will die or develop more severe symptoms of the virus.

Even at the peak of hospitalizations, deaths remained low, with only four pediatric Covid deaths recorded at the peak of the Delta variant and two at the peak of Omicron.

The CDC reported that, despite the sharp increase during the Omicron, hospital admissions among children (dashed line) remained significantly lower during the pandemic than among adults (dashed line).

Data were collected through the Coronavirus Disease 19 Associated Hospitalization Surveillance Network from March 2020 to mid-January 2022.

Children aged four and under were included in the study as they are the only age group not yet eligible for vaccination in the United States.

At the peak of the Omicron peak the week ending January 8, 2022, 14.5 out of 100,000 US children four years old or younger were hospitalized with the virus, according to the CDC.

At the height of the delta variant’s reign, only 2.9 out of 100,000 infected children were hospitalized in the week ending 9/11.

By comparison, the overall hospitalization rate in the US population was approximately 30 per 100,000 in the same week in January and 11 per 100,000 in the week of September.

There is growing evidence that children are at low risk of contracting the virus and infant deaths are extremely rare. Pictured: A child tests for COVID-19 on December 14 in Chicago, Illinois.

This shows that during both weeks, as during the pandemic, children represent a very small percentage of the total patients admitted to the hospital for Covid.

About half of children hospitalized with Covid have an underlying condition that also increases their risk of serious infection, the report said.

Babies younger than six months were most affected during the micron period, and the number of hospitalizations for the age group increased six-fold in the winter season.

But this age group is often hospitalized for other reasons, and the CDC report did not specifically specify whether this age group had more non-Covid-related hospitalizations than others.

The six-month to 23-month age group peaked during Omicron’s peak, with just over ten hospitalizations per 100,000 members of the population, with the two to four age group reaching nearly five per 100,000.

Evidence suggests that children are at low risk for COVID-19, and an increasing amount of data shows that children are not as affected as adults.

The CDC reports that children are responsible for less than only 0.1% of Covid deaths in the United States since the start of the pandemic.

The agency did not immediately respond to a question from DailyMail.com regarding its response to the published guidelines.

A University of Utah study last year found that 50% of pediatric Covid cases are asymptomatic. The study was done before the milder variant of Omicron appeared; this means that children are now at a lower risk of experiencing symptoms as well.

A study done in Germany shows that in adults they only release 25% of virus particles.

Data released by New York state officials late last month showed that the injection was only 12% effective in preventing Covid infection for children ages five to 11.