This article originally appeared on BeMedWise. An up-to-date version can be found here.
COVID-19 is not rare in children and adolescents. At time of writing, it has infected more than 7.3% (5,518,815) of the young people in the United States. Since even those with mild or asymptomatic disease can spread COVID to others, they are a source of infection for unprotected and vulnerable individuals.
Other than reducing the spread of COVID infections, there are many reasons why we need to commit to immunizing children and adolescents and utilizing other proven protective measures such as face masks, social distancing, screening questions, contact tracing, staying home when sick, and periodic COVID testing.
Despite early impressions and ongoing rhetoric that COVID-19 infection is uncommon and relatively harmless in children, time has shown that children and adolescents are getting COVID at increasing rates and that the number that are getting severe disease and/or have significant mental and physical complications from COVID disease is not trivial.
1 – Increasing Number of Cases
Since the Delta variant has become predominant,