Omicron COVID-19 variant ‘less severe’ than Delta for kids under 5, new U.S. study says
Global News
A study from the U.S. suggests that children younger than five who are infected with Omicron have less risk of severe health outcomes than those infected with the Delta variant.
The peer-reviewed research, which was published on April 1 in JAMA Pediatrics, focuses on the health outcomes of this age group, which is not yet eligible for vaccination against COVID-19.
The research team examined clinical health outcomes for pediatric patients during a 14-day window following infection. Among the factors they reviewed were: emergency room visits, hospitalizations, ICU admissions and mechanical ventilation use.
“The major conclusion to our research was that many more children were infected with Omicron when compared to Delta, but the children who are infected are not impacted as severely,” Pamela Davis, one of the study’s researchers at the Case Western Reserve School of Medicine, said in a press release.
“However, because there are so many more children infected, our hospitals were affected over the winter months by an influx of young children,” she added.
The study shows that the Omicron variant is six to eight times more infectious than the Delta variant. The severe health outcomes ranged from a 16 per cent lower risk for emergency room visits to 85 per cent less risk for mechanical ventilation.
Also, about 1.8 per cent of children infected with Omicron were hospitalized, compared to 3.3 per cent with Delta, the study says.
To arrive at these findings, the team said it went through the electronic health records of more than 651,640 children in the United States who got infected between September 2021 and January 2022.
“We saw the number of hospitalizations within this age group skyrocket in January of this year because the infection rate of Omicron is about 10 to 15 times compared to that of the Delta variant,” Rong Xu, a professor of biomedical informatics who was also part of the research team, said in a press release.
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