At Children’s Hospital of Mississippi, nearly 20 children are hospitalized with COVID-19, and four of those patients are in intensive care. Dr. Charlotte Hobbs is a Professor of Pediatric Infectious Disease and Microbiology at the University of Mississippi Medical Center. Children have been at risk for Multi-system Inflammatory Syndrom throughout all variants of the coronavirus, but she says the omicron variant seems to have a higher chance to cause upper airways disease.
“Which is more dangerous for younger children, because your windpipe is basically the size of your pinky fingers. If there’s inflammation obviously [it] could be compromised pretty quickly. And the majority of the children that we’re seeing this time are as I said younger, but also children who are not eligible for vaccination, or children who have been eligible but have not yet been vaccinated.”
Coronavirus vaccines are available for children over the age of 5, and the CDC warns parents to not have children under the age of two wear masks. Dr. Hobbs says the best way for families to protect their young children who do not qualify for the vaccine is to get the rest of the family vaccinated.
“We also continue as a pediatric community to advise the use of masks in schools as a public health initiative to protect our children. We’re almost two years into this pandemic, and we basically have to live with it now and eventually, hopefully, there will be less waves of these new variants as a greater portion of the population does become vaccinated on a worldwide level.”
Dr. Hobbs says children are less likely to develop severe symptoms from the coronavirus than adults, however, she says the substantial levels of community transmission ongoing in the state puts a higher number of children at risk than ever before.
