Question: I was just reading about how COVID-related hospitalizations are the highest they’ve been, even higher than the winter surge of last year.  What about hospitalization trends among children?  

Answer: The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) issues a weekly report, Children and COVID-19, the most recent of which was published yesterday.  Additionally, CDC tracks new COVID-related hospital admissions by place and age (Figure 1).  As the left panel of Figure 1 shows, COVID-related hospitalizations across all age groups are at an all-time high (5.6 new admissions per 100,000 population), even among 0-17 year olds (bottom panel; 1.14 new admissions per 100,000 population).  The overarching reason for this increase in hospitalizations is the exponential increase in cases.  As the AAP reports, “Nearly 8.5 million children have tested positive for COVID-19 since the onset of the pandemic; nearly 11% of these cases have been added in the past two weeks.” (Figure 2) AAP further reports that over the course of the pandemic (e.g. not Omicron-specific), 0.1%-1.6% of all child COVID-19 cases resulted in hospitalization.  

Because vaccination protects against severe COVID, including hospitalization, it is imperative that parents get their eligible children (e.g. those ages 5+) vaccinated and, when appropriate, boosted.  And for young children not yet eligible for vaccination, it is imperative that the rest of us do our part to protect them (for example, by diligently wearing our medical-grade masks when in public settings and getting ourselves vaccinated/boosted).   

Figure 1. Time Trend in COVID-related Hospital Admissions by Age, USA (from CDC) 

Figure 2. Regional Trends in Cases among Children over Time (from AAP)