Children's hospitals around the country are filling up as the omicron variant of COVID-19 continues to spread.
''We are in a difficult situation,'' Claudia Hoyen, a pediatric infectious-disease specialist at University Hospitals Rainbow Babies & Children's Hospital in Cleveland, told The Washington Post on Friday. ''With omicron, we are now having this new surge on top of what was left over from delta.''
Hoyen's hospital is one of many in states such as Ohio, New York, Pennsylvania and Texas that are adding a national average of 800 admissions per day for the last three days consisting of children infected with the new variant.
Those states have hospitalized 1,987 suspected or confirmed pediatric COVID cases in the last 10 days, an increase of 31% during the period, the Post reported.
In the last week, some 170,000 children and adolescents were added to the total of 7.4 million infected with the virus since the beginning of the pandemic, according to the report.
While doctors told the newspaper that the number of infections is in record territory with the new variant, the symptoms appear less severe than those of the disease's previous incarnations — milder, like a common cold.
The American Academy of Pediatrics is reporting that new COVID cases among children are being reported at more than 100,000 per week for the last 19 weeks, adding 2.3 million cases since September.
For the week ending Dec. 16, the number of new pediatric COVID cases accounted for 23.7% of the total new cases, while children make up around 17% of the population, the organization said.
As the number of new cases continues to rise around the country, children being admitted to the hospital for the disease or dying from it remain ''uncommon,'' according to the organization.
''At this time, it appears that severe illness due to COVID-19 is uncommon among children,'' the organization said on its website. ''However, there is an urgent need to collect more data on longer-term impacts of the pandemic on children, including ways the virus may harm the long-term physical health of infected children, as well as its emotional and mental health effects.''
Aaron Milstone with Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore told the Post that while the symptoms may be like those of a common cold or mild flu, parents should treat it as COVID.
''Parents have to recognize that yes, there is cold and flu and RSV [Respiratory Syncytial Virus],'' Milstone told the Post. ''But right now, the dominant cause of symptoms that look like cold is probably COVID.''
The physicians interviewed by the Post for the story agreed that getting children vaccinated is the best protection for them against hospitalization or death from the virus.
''The good news is the probability of having serious illness goes down when you are vaccinated across all ages,'' Nathan Hagstrom, chair of pediatrics at the Lehigh Valley Health Network, which operates hospitals in the Allentown-Bethlehem region of Pennsylvania, told the Post.
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