The study found that the delta variant did not cause more severe cases in children and adolescents

The delta variant does not cause more severe cases of Covid-19 in children and adolescents than the other variants. This is the first result of data released by US health authorities on Friday, September 3, as concerns grow in the country about a growing number of children in hospitals.

The Centers for Disease Prevention and Control (CDC), the leading federal public health agency, studied data from hospitalized patients for Covid-19 in 99 counties across 14 states, covering about 10% of the US population.

Specifically, the agency compared the period from early March to mid-June with the period from mid-June to late July, when the delta variant became dominant in the United States. Between these two periods, the number of hospitalizations for children and adolescents aged 0 to 17 years increased fivefold.

bot Proportion of children and adolescents treated for critical illnesses in hospitalFor example when entering the intensive care unit,It was similar before and during the Delta period.”.

Of the 3,116 children and adolescents who were hospitalized in the three and a half months before Delta, about 26% were admitted to intensive care, 6% were on a ventilator, and less than 1% died. After Delta, of the 164 hospitalizations, about 23% had been admitted to the ICU at a month and a half, 10% were on a ventilator, and less than 2% had died. Thus the differences between the two periods are not statistically significant.

However, the CDC notes that the number of children with severe cases of the disease was small between mid-June and late July, limiting the significance of the comparisons made. They stress that the data should continue to be closely monitored in the future.

This work also shows that vaccines still protect adolescents well from Delta: hospital admissions were about ten times higher for unvaccinated adolescents than for those vaccinated during the Delta control period. In the United States, adolescents younger than 12 years old can receive Pfizer injections.