Younger layers of the American population down to the level of four years old, or below, are contracting COVID. There now exist 840,000 children under the age of four who have contracted COVID since the beginning of the pandemic, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
One article, Oct. 6, headlined, “Toddler on Ventilator Fights for His Life as COVID takes toll on U.S. children,” reports on the case of Adrian Jackson, a two-year-old, who contracted COVID and was airlifted to Cardinal Glennon Children’s Hospital in St. Louis, Missouri. Adrian, who was trying to gulp air with 76 respirations per minute — nearly twice the normal 40 — and who contracted the Delta variant, is on a ventilator, and it appears he may survive.
There is also a large increase in the number of all children who are becoming SARS-CoV-2 infected. On June 4, 2020, children constituted 5.2% of those individuals who had COVID-19 in the United States (the status of a child is defined differently in each state, but most often it is someone whose age is between 0-16 or between 0-18), according to data from the American Academy of Pediatrics and Children’s Hospital Association. By December 3, 2020, children constituted 1,460,935 cases of COVID, or 12% of all those infected with COVID. By September 30, 2021 there were 5,899,148 cumulative child cases of COVID, constituting 16.2% of all those cumulative cases of Americans with COVID.
However, for the week ending September 30, children were 26.7% of reported weekly COVID-19 cases, more than one-quarter of the new cases. That is, they are increasing as a number of the new cases, which enables the percent of all cases since the start of the epidemic to rise.
Currently, because they are young and have aggressive immune systems, they have a low rate of hospitalization. But, the fact that they are becoming infected in growing numbers, indicates, they are a potential pool, which, were a variant of COVID to become more dominant that is deadly to young people—as some other viruses are—would be a susceptible vulnerability.
