Hospitalizations of children for Covid jumped from 284 to 2,232 from December to January

The recent explosion of child hospitalizations for Covid far outweighs the general curve of increase during the wave associated with the omicron variant in Brazil.

Survey of sheet with data from the Ministry of Health reveals that the number of children under 12 years old hospitalized with complications from the disease jumped from 284 in December to 2,232 in January. A climb of 686%.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, Brazil had not seen so many pediatric hospitalizations for Covid in a single month. There were 70% more compared to January of last year and 11% above March, the peak of care in the country in all age groups.

Among the other ages, which concentrate the majority of the population, the increase from December to January was proportionally lower, at 395%.

Hospitalizations of adolescents and adults rose from 7,399 to 36,600, driven especially by the elderly.

Despite the significant increase, this amount is well below the 95,800 calls in January last year and the 228,300 registered in March, at the height of the pandemic.

Practically one in ten hospitalizations for Covid in the 0 to 11 age group in Brazil occurred in January 2022.

According to experts, the main explanation is the lack of vaccination coverage in this public.

Authorized on December 16th by Anvisa for children aged five years and over and officially started on January 14th, the immunization campaign started at a slow pace.

As of Monday (14), the date of the last update of admission records, 28% of eligible children had received the first dose, according to data from the state health departments collected by the consortium of press vehicles formed by sheetUOL, O Globo, G1, O Estado de S. Paulo and Extra.

Among adult Brazilians, 94% were protected with the first complete cycle (two doses or the single-application immunizer).

“We observed an impressive increase, surely related to the dynamics of transmission. It is like a battle, in which the virus wants to survive and seeks the places where it will be least attacked. Today, the most vulnerable niche is precisely children”, explains Raphael Guimarães, researcher from Fiocruz’s Covid-19 Observatory.

The analysis of sheet shows that the proportion of hospitalized children has grown in relation to the general average.

They represented about 1.5% of the hospitalization curve until November last year. At the end of January, it was 6%.

The rejuvenation of the pandemic had already been observed by scientists on other occasions. Nor is it exclusive to Brazil.

In the United States, children aged nine and under accounted for 5% of the average admissions in the first week of January. Until May 2021, this index had not exceeded 2%.

There, coverage was also low. A quarter of those under 12 had received a dose, and less than a fifth had received a complete first cycle. The data are from the CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention).

As immunity advances among the elderly, the average age of those infected tends to decrease, summarizes Guimarães.

In Brazil, this movement became very clear between May and July, after the vaccination of the elderly. The 20 to 59 age group came to account for more than half of deaths over six consecutive weeks and for more than 60% of hospitalizations in the ICU (intensive care unit) for two consecutive months, according to a Fiocruz report.

The lifting of sheet points to a sharp drop in the presence of longer-lived groups, after vaccination, in relation to the average number of hospitalized cases.

The septuagenarians represented 20% of those hospitalized in January of last year, but only 7.5% in June. Among the sixty-year-olds, the proportion dropped from 24% in May to 12% in July, contrary to the new peaks in attendance among younger people.

More recently, after the expansion of vaccination coverage for adults, the percentage of elderly people increased again in relation to the total.

Pediatric infectious disease specialist Marcio Nehab points out that the low genomic surveillance and the exhaustion of diagnostic tests during the explosion of cases in January limit further analysis of the real impact of the omicron in this scenario.

“Today, people who are not properly vaccinated, without two doses or a booster, are the vast majority of those we hospitalize. And children are part of the group of unvaccinated people. This is the main factor for the absolute increase. susceptible”, says the specialist from the IFF (National Institute of Health for Women, Children and Adolescents Fernandes Figueira).

According to the IBGE, there are about 20.5 million Brazilians under the age of 12 in the population.

Before the start of childhood vaccination, President Jair Bolsonaro (PL) said that the number of children affected by Covid was “insignificant” and criticized Anvisa’s decision.

Minister Marcelo Queiroga resorted to the jargon “pressure is the enemy of perfection” when asked about the topic in December.

Until the last update of official data, Covid had caused at least 1,536 deaths and 25,295 hospitalizations for severe acute respiratory syndrome (Srag) among children.

Of the total number of deaths, 125 were registered in January this year (8%).

There were also 63 deaths and 1,160 hospitalizations due to pediatric multisystem inflammatory syndrome (SIM-P) only in children aged 0 to 9 years.

The numbers may seem small compared to the 638,900 lives taken by the coronavirus in Brazil at the time of analysis.

However, according to a note from Conass (National Council of Health Secretaries) and the Ministry’s own balance sheet, no other vaccine-preventable disease caused as many deaths of children in the country in 2021 as Covid.

The lifting of sheet considered only hospitalizations by Srag with a confirmed diagnosis for the coronavirus and considered closed, either by discharge or death.

Records with an evident error in filling in the ages or dates of birth, as well as the dates of hospitalization, notification and closure, were excluded.

Finally, the two most recent weeks, starting from the last notification, were disregarded to avoid distortions generated by delays in the digitization of the forms — an average of 16 days.