Health officials and experts continue to urge Americans to be vaccinated since it is the most effective approach to avoid hospitalization and other complications.
Not only has the efficiency of vaccination been proved in terms of keeping more people safe, but booster doses for those who are eligible have also been shown to improve protection against Omicron.
The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on Monday expanded the emergency use authorization for Pfizer/Covid-19 BioNTech’s vaccine boosters to include children ages 12 to 15. Boosters are already widely available to those over the age of 16, but the FDA has now made them available to children ages 12 to 15.
As part of this change, the duration between obtaining a booster injection and receiving another series has been decreased from at least six months following completion of the previous series to at least five months for everyone 12 and older.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, almost 5 million children between the ages of 12 and 15 have been fully vaccinated for more than five months and are now eligible to receive a booster dose.
Since the announcement of the Omicron variant’s arrival in the United States last month, there has been a massive increase in Covid-19 cases, compounding the Delta outbreak that is already underway and forcing some school districts to return to online learning or in-person mask wearing until the outbreak subsides completely.
Although evidence suggests that Omicron is less likely than Delta to cause serious disease, the fact that it is highly transmissible means that many more people will become infected, putting a strain on health-care systems.
Early study reveals that Omicron may be more likely than prior strains to produce upper airway problems, as opposed to previous strains that caused lower airway problems.
However, children may be more at risk than adults from upper airway problems.
“We cannot treat the airways of children like they are the airways of adults,” says Dr. Edith Bracho-Sanchez, a primary care pediatrician and assistant professor of pediatrics at Columbia University Irving Medical Center in New York.
“It’s just not the way it works. And for us pediatricians, we know that respiratory viruses can lead to … croup and bronchiolitis, that inflammation of the upper airways that does get in children in trouble.”
In the last two weeks, the nation’s largest pediatric hospital, Texas Children’s Hospital in Houston, has seen a more than four-fold increase in child hospitalizations due to Covid-19, which has been attributed to the widespread distribution of the Omicron and Delta strains during the holiday season.
During a 24-hour period last week, more than 700 children were admitted to the hospital with Covid-19, according to Dr. Jim Versalovic, pathologist-in-chief at Texas Children’s, and DNA sequencing revealed that the Omicron variant was responsible for 90 percent of the cases.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), children are the least vaccinated age group in the United States, with approximately 53 percent of those aged 12-17 fully vaccinated and those under 5-11 significantly less so. Americans between the ages of 18 and 24 are approximately 59 percent fully vaccinated, while those between the ages of 25 and 39 are 63 percent fully vaccinated.
Around 62 percent of the US population is fully vaccinated, and over 33 percent of those have had a booster, the CDC says.
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