It isn’t clear whether the Delta variant is making kids sicker than they would have been if infected with previous strains. Some pediatricians believe that is the case because of the severity of the cases they have treated. Other pediatricians don’t think Delta is causing more severe Covid-19 in children than earlier variants. But with Delta spreading widely, the number of children hospitalized with Covid-19 far outstrips anything they saw in the past.
Children’s Hospital New Orleans has had as many as 20 children hospitalized for Covid-19 at a time in the past three weeks, said Mark Kline, the hospital’s physician-in-chief. In 2020, the number never topped seven, he said.
Nick Hysmith, medical director of infection prevention at Le Bonheur Children’s Hospital in Memphis, Tenn., has also been preparing for an influx of pediatric patients as the region’s school districts prepare for the fall semester.
Before the past few weeks, he said his hospital rarely saw a hospitalized Covid-19 patient, and that most of them had mild infections along with a more serious condition that had landed them in the treatment. Now, the hospital consistently has a handful of children hospitalized for Covid-19, he said, including at least two in the pediatric ICU on average. Many of those young patients don’t have underlying conditions, he said.
“This is different than we saw before. We weren’t sustaining those numbers several months ago,” he said.
