New Omicron variant fills up children's hospitals in the U.S.Healthcare workers put on PPE on the COVID-19 ICU floor of the University of Massachusetts (UMass) Memorial Hospital in Worcester, Massachusetts, U.S., on Monday, Dec. 27, 2021. (Allison Dinner/Bloomberg/Getty Images/CNN)
A five-fold increase in pediatric admissions in New York City this month. Close to double the numbers admitted in Washington, D.C. And nationwide, on average, pediatric hospitalizations in the U.S. are up 35 per cent in just the past week.
The highly transmissible Omicron variant is teaming up with the busy holiday season to infect more children across the United States than ever before, and children's hospitals are bracing for it to get even worse.
"I think we are going to see more numbers now than we have ever seen," Dr. Stanley Spinner, who is chief medical officer and vice president at Texas Children's Pediatrics & Urgent Care in Houston, told CNN.
MORE KIDS IN HOSPITALS
Across the country, pediatricians are bracing for a busy January.
"It's almost like you can see the train coming down the track and you're just hoping it doesn't go off the rails," Dr. Claudia Hoyen, director of pediatric infection control at UH Rainbow Babies and Children's Hospital in Cleveland told CNN.
"It's going to be a very interesting couple of weeks. We've just had all of these kids mixing together with everybody else during Christmas. We have one more holiday to get through with New Year's, and then we'll be sending everybody back to school," Hoyen said.
"Everybody is kind of waiting on the edge, wondering what we'll end up seeing."
And while the Delta variant infected more children than previous variants, Omicron is looking even worse, Spinner said.
"What's concerning on the (pediatric) side is that, unlike the adults -- where they're reporting for the number of adults getting infected relatively low numbers getting hospitalized -- what we're really seeing, we think, is an increasing number of kids being hospitalized," Spinner said.
"So that is a concern to us, especially with those that can't be vaccinated under 5 or those that are not fully vaccinated or not vaccinated at all that are eligible over 5. So it is a big concern."
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