AUSTIN, Texas — In its weekly COVID-19 briefing on Friday, Austin Public Health officials said that although they are seeing local case numbers on the decline, January marked an increase in pediatric hospital admissions.
Local health leaders invited Dr. Sarmistha Hauger, pediatric infectious disease specialist at Dell Children’s Medical Center and associate professor at Dell Medical School, to Friday's briefing.
Dr. Hauger said that 9 million children have tested positive for COVID-19 since the pandemic began. And, since January, about 900,000 have tested positive. Nationwide, she said about 2.9% of all hospitalizations are children.
"We have felt it in our hospital," she said. "Since the pandemic began, we've taken care of over 300 children that have been admitted with COVID, and they're positive and symptomatic. Since January ... we've exceed how many admissions we had since in the summer with delta, when we had the delta surge."
One of the main changes she said they've seen with omicron is that there are a lot more younger children being admitted.
"So, about almost 37% or so of our children that are admitted since January have fallen into that younger age group, 0-4. This is a big change for us with previous surges, with first Alpha and Delta, which were mostly teenagers or above 12," she said.
Austin Public Health's Dr. Desmar Walkes said that, locally, 91% of the children who are being admitted are unvaccinated.
"The children that are ill and are vaccinated, or have some vaccine, usually have an immune problem that can't mount an antibody response to the virus," Dr. Hauger said. "So people that are healthy, the children that are healthy that are getting admitted, are almost all unvaccinated."
She added that about a fifth of the children have required intensive care, meaning they needed assistance getting their oxygen levels back to normal.
Dr. Hauger also mentioned that though it is a bit early in the omicron surge, they have not seen the MIS-C rates as experienced during the delta surge, but they are keeping an eye on it.
Health officials added that, currently, the local community is now about 71% vaccinated. They also said that about 94,000 children within the eligible population – 5 to 15 – have received at least one dose.
They also noted that though COVID-19 cases may seem to be leveling off currently, another surge is not completely off the table due to a new "stealth" subvariant that spreads quicker than omicron. Officials said that variant is already in Central Texas and that though it spreads quicker, it seems to produce milder symptoms and does not appear to be any more dangerous.
"It is however being attacked by those vaccine antibodies that we have in our toolboxes, so the vaccines we have are working against it," said Dr. Walkes.
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