Children and COVID: New Cases Up by 50%

Children and COVID: New Cases Up by 50%

Richard Franki

May 18, 2022

3

The latest increase in new child COVID-19 cases seems to be picking up steam, rising by 50% in the last week, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Children’s Hospital Association.

The new-case count was over 93,000 for the week of May 6-12, compared with 62,000 the previous week. That 50% week-to-week change follows increases of 17%, 44%, 12%, and 28% since the nationwide weekly total fell to its low point for the year (25,915) in the beginning of April, the AAP and CHA said in their weekly COVID report.

 

Regionally, the distribution of those 93,000 COVID cases was fairly even. The Northeast, which saw the biggest jump for the week, and the Midwest were both around 25,000 new cases, while the South had about 20,000 and the West was lowest with 18,000 or so. At the state/territory level, the largest percent increases over the last 2 weeks were found in Maine and Puerto Rico, with Massachusetts and Vermont just a step behind, the AAP/CHA data show.

In cumulative terms, there have been over 13.1 million cases of COVID-19 among children in the United States, with pediatric cases representing 19.0% of all cases since the pandemic began, the two organizations reported. They also noted a number of important limitations: New York state has never reported cases by age, several states have stopped updating their online dashboards, and states apply a variety of age ranges to define children (Alabama has the smallest range, 0-14 years; South Carolina, Tennessee, and West Virginia the largest, 0-20).

Comments

3090D553-9492-4563-8681-AD288FA52ACE
Comments on Medscape are moderated and should be professional in tone and on topic. You must declare any conflicts of interest related to your comments and responses. Please see our Commenting Guide for further information. We reserve the right to remove posts at our sole discretion.

processing....