World News: Hospitalisation surge among US children – Gulf Digital News

World News: Hospitalisation surge among US children – Gulf Digital News

NEW YORK: Within weeks, the Omicron variant has fuelled thousands of new Covid-19 hospitalisations among US children, raising new concerns about how the many unvaccinated Americans under the age more than 58 per cent nationwide in the past week to 334, compared with around 19pc for all age groups, data from the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention show.

Fewer than 25pc of the 74 million Americans under 18 are vaccinated, according to the CDC.

Omicron cases are expected to surge even faster across the US as schools reopen next week after the winter holiday, experts cautioned.

Doctors say it is too early to determine whether Omicron causes more severe illness in children than other variants of the coronavirus, but that its extremely high transmissibility is one key factor that is driving up hospitalisations.

“It is going to infect more people and it is infecting more people. We’ve seen numbers go up, we’ve seen hospitalisations in children go up,” said Dr Jennifer Nayak, an infectious disease expert and paediatrician at the University of Rochester Medical Centre.