Rajeev Choudhury

As many as 30 per cent of the children who needed hospitalisation due to COVID19 infections in the United States had no comorbid conditions, researchers of a new study by the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said.

The study, published as an early release on April 19, 2022, analysed the data of the children admitted to hospitals across the United States due to COVID19 infections between March 2020  and February 2022 and found that over a quarter of the children had to be hospitalised between December 19, 2021, to February 28, 2022, when Omicron variant was predominant.

While 87% of the 397 hospitalised children during the Omicron wave were unvaccinated, 19% had to be admitted to an intensive care unit, the researchers found.

The cumulative hospitalisation rate during the Omicron-predominant period was 2.1 times as high among unvaccinated children (19.1 per 100,000 population) as among vaccinated children (9.2), they wrote in the paper.

The researchers further reported that the peak ICU admission rates were 1.7 times as high during Omicron predominance than during Delta predominance.

As many as 33% of the children hospitalised during the Omicron predominance had neurological disorders up from 21% during the pre-Delta period, they wrote in the paper.

While children suffering from diabetes and obesity were more at risk of progressing to severe COVID19, the risk was lower among the children who were immune-compromised or asthmatic, the researchers said.

The researchers did not find a significant association of other conditions with severe COVID19 among hospitalised children.

Increasing COVID19 vaccination coverage among children aged 5–11 years, particularly among racial and ethnic minority groups disproportionately affected by COVID19, can prevent COVID19 associated hospitalisation and severe outcomes, they concluded.

However, admitting that the study had limitations the researchers said that grouping partially vaccinated children with unvaccinated ones has the potential of influencing the results apart from the primary reason for admission was not always clear, and medical charts might not completely capture underlying conditions, potentially resulting in misclassification.