State health officials are warning that the Delta variant appears to impact children much more than the original strain of coronavirus. Children’s Hospital Chief Academic Officer Dr. Mark Kline says a lot more kids are getting sick with COVID than at any time before.
“Every children’s facility in the state is absolutely full, I know at the Children’s Hospital in New Orleans we have not had an empty bed in any of our intensive care units for weeks,” said Kline.
Governor Edwards says of the 11,000 cases reported since Friday over 2,000 of them were children.
Kline says in the last month they have had as many as 20 children admitted for COVID at any given time.
“That doesn’t sound like a lot of patients, but to put it in context throughout the entirety of the pandemic, back to its very beginning, the greatest number of patients ever in the hospital at any given day prior to this time was seven,” said Kline.
Kline says there’s a myth that children are immune to COVID, or that only children with preexisting conditions are at risk of severe cases
“But half of the children that we are seeing today were perfectly healthy children who have been infected with COVID and then required admission to the hospital or the intensive care unit,” said Kline.
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