The news that a 13-year-old girl from Brampton, Ont. died in April from COVID-19 brought parents? worst fears bubbling to the surface: with new COVID-19 variants and a third wave of the virus spreading across the country, should we now be more worried about our children falling ill or dying"
The short answer is no, says Jeremy Friedman, associate paediatrician-in-chief at Toronto?s SickKids Hospital. ?I don?t think that parents should necessarily be any more worried.? That?s because even with the variants spreading in Canada it is still rare for children to get extremely ill, and rarer still for them to die from COVID-19.
He adds that while his hospital is seeing more admissions due to COVID-19 now than in earlier waves, the number of kids hospitalized is still very small?about four to five at any given time?and more likely a result of increased spread in the community than a more dangerous form of the virus. (As of May 6, there were nine paediatric patients at SickKids.) How many kids have gotten COVID-19"
As of April 30, 2021 there have been about 219,000 cases of COVID-19 in people 18 and under, representing 18 percent of the total cases in Canada. However, only 851 people in this age group?which makes up roughly 20 percent of the population?have been hospitalized for COVID-19 symptoms across Canada since the pandemic began. That works out to 1.7 percent of the total hospitalizations for COVID-19. There have been 145 kids admitted to the ICU (1.3 percent of t...