Children’s hospitals don’t have many COVID-19 patients right now, but doctors urge parents to be vigilant to avoid what’s happening in southern states.
LINCOLN, Neb. (KLKN) – State children’s hospitals say they are not seeing many COVID-19 patients right now.
Complete Children’s Health currently has zero COVID patients. Children’s Hospital pediatrician Dr. Chris Maloney says that the hospital has “consistently” had fewer than five COVID patients. Today, there are two at Children’s.
Despite the low numbers, health officials are urging parents to be vigilant in protecting their kids from the coronavirus, due to the surge of the delta variant and disturbing trends in other states.
“Many places in the south states: Arkansas, Children’s hospital in Texas, in Louisiana, in Florida, they are filling up with COVID patients, they’re having COVID admissions like they’ve never seen before, and we anticipate that will happen if we don’t employ the non-pharmaceutical interventions such as masking and social distancing,” Maloney said.
Health officials say that they don’t see the same number of hospitalizations for children that they do in other age groups.
Many of dangers of COVID to children manifest over time. Children can develop multisystem inflammatory syndrome (also known as MIS-C) or long Covid syndrome months after an initial infection.
“Patients have almost a chronic, fatigue-like syndrome,” Complete Children’s Health pediatrician Dr. Sian Jones-Jobst said. “Muscle aches, weakness, heart dysfunction, lung dysfunction, fatigue, brain fog, cognitive slowing depression, and for those adolescents that we’re seeing that are suffering from that these symptoms go on for months, and some have still not resolved.”
On Wednesday, Channel 8 requested data on pediatric positive COVID case numbers, hospitalizations and deaths from both the Lincoln-Lancaster County Health Department and the Children’s Hospital in Omaha.
Both organizations indicated they would look into it, but have yet to send the data as of Thursday evening.
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Originally Appeared Here