Hospitalizations of young children increased fivefold during omicron surge, but few died--CDC report

“The bigger picture here is that covid can be a severe disease, even in young children and even in otherwise healthy children,” said William Moss, executive director of the International Vaccine Access Center at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, who had no involvement in the study. “Although the risk of severe disease is higher in older adults than in children, children are not spared covid-19, and even otherwise healthy children without underlying health conditions can be hospitalized.”

Omicron is a more highly transmissible variant that caused more people in every age group to get sick, including more small children, Moss noted. But it did not cause more severe infections than previous variants — the proportion of hospitalized children who ended up in the intensive care unit was smaller during the omicron wave than it was during the delta wave that began last summer and continued through fall and winter.

Still, omicron put many more children under 5 in the hospital and the significantly higher number of infected youths led to three and a half times more admissions to the pediatric ICU, according to the CDC report.

About 63 percent of those hospitalized children had no underlying medical conditions and 44 percent were infants under 6 months, the study found. ...