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New York hospitalizations for COVID-19 are increasing fastest among children and teens, the head of the state Health Department warned Friday.
Official statistics show there were 85 kids admitted to the hospital with the coronavirus during the week that ended Dec. 4 — and that the figure soared to 571 during the week that ended Jan. 1, Health Commissioner Mary Bassett said.
That’s an eight-fold increase for children under age 5, who can’t yet get vaccinated, and a 10-fold jump for those over age 12, Bassett said.
“It’s the rate of the increase more than the numbers that make us very concerned,” Bassett said during a news conference with Gov. Kathy Hochul in Manhattan.
For New York City alone, there were 23 kids admitted to local hospitals for COVID the week ending Dec. 4, with the figure jumping to 385 children being admitted the week closing Jan. 1, state statistics show.
Bassett said the “vast majority” of the state’s pediatric patients are unvaccinated.
Still, most of the children hospitalized with COVID aren’t ending up in intensive care units, which are filled with “older, sicker and mainly unvaccinated’’ patients, Dr. Steven Corwin, CEO of the NewYork-Presbyterian health care network, said during the news conference.
Dr. Stanley Weiss, an epidemiologist and professor at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School, told The Post that kids are especially susceptible to the highly transmissible and now-dominant Omicron strain of the coronavirus.
“It seems to particularly cause very severe upper-airway, upper-nose, dry-type symptoms,” Weiss said.
“Some of the kids with Omicron infection have these coughs that sound terrible and can make it difficult for them to breathe.”
The reason is, kids are not just small people, their anatomy is different, so if they get heavily congested in the upper airway and the nose it can be harder for them to breathe, relative to an adult.”
Weiss also noted that “kids seem to have been relatively spared in the earlier COVID-19 variants for reasons we don’t fully understand.”
“They’re not being spared from Omicron, that’s certain,” he added.
Meanwhile, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention updated its guidance to schools late Thursday and said kids could emerge from COVID-19 isolation and quarantine after just five days, down from 10.
Also during Friday’s news conference, Hochul said:
- About 39 percent of recent statewide COVID-19 hospitalizations involved patients who tested positive after being admitted for “non-COVID reasons,” with the ratio in New York City “about 50-50.”
- The state recorded about 82,000 new coronavirus cases Thursday, resulting in a “better trend line than we had been seeing up until now” and leaving officials “hoping for a plateau.”
- All health care workers will soon be required to get booster shots in addition to their state-mandated COVID-19 vaccinations, which Hochul said would make New York the first state to adopt that directive.
- New Yorkers are stressing hospital resources by going to emergency rooms to be tested for the coronavirus, including “nearly 5,000 people in the past 24 hours.”
“Please do not do that to our health care system,” Hochul said.
The state has ordered an additional 12 million test kits, bringing the total to 49 million, and will be “deploying more kits to hospitals” so they can be handed out in parking lots, Hochul said.
Additional reporting by Nolan Hicks and Elizabeth Rosner
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