Source: Global Times
[Global Times special correspondent in South Korea and the United States Zhang Jing, Wang Yi Global Times reporter Fan Wei, Hu Bofeng, Liu Yupeng, Yuan Yi] Editor's words: The harm of the Omicron mutation is becoming increasingly prominent. Statistics from the United States, Singapore, India and other countries show that children are a group with a very high infection rate of the Opmi kerong variant at this stage, and even 17% of the confirmed patients in Russia are children. As a vulnerable group, children's own epidemic prevention and protection, treatment and rehabilitation of confirmed children require the joint efforts of parents and society. In countries where the epidemic has not been effectively controlled, children have become the hardest hit areas and have caused many social problems. For example, concerns about the after-effects of COVID-19 are hanging over South Koreans. At present, governments and relevant experts are calling on parents to vaccinate their children as soon as possible.
The number of hospitalized children in many U.S. states has reached a new high
"The fact that our concerns about schools, children and child care in schools, and the elderly are ignored are just new evidence of widespread ageism in our society." The New York Times article recently quoted Elizabeth Dugan, an associate professor of geriatrics at the University of Massachusetts, as saying that the virus is threatening children who are too young to be vaccinated.
As the Opichron variant spreads across the country, the number of hospitalized children across the country is increasing dramatically, with nine states including Connecticut and Washington, D.C., reporting a new high in confirmed child hospitalizations, according to NBC. The large number of children in need of hospital care frustrates pediatric infectious disease doctors working on the front lines. Mark Klein, chief physician at New Orleans Children's Hospital, said: "It took us two years to refute the fallacy that COVID-19 is 'harmless' to children, but there are still people trying to downplay the impact of this disease on children." Jim, a pathologist at Texas Children's Hospital, said pediatric hospitalizations exceeded the peak of patient numbers during the Delta strain ravaging last summer.
According to russia's Herald, when the epidemic was severe at the beginning of the year, the number of confirmed children in Moscow increased sharply, from 2,000 to 28,000 per week. Russian Health Ministry officials announced in February that about 17 percent of the country's confirmed COVID-19 patients were children, tens of thousands of children were hospitalized, and 2.3 percent were in serious condition. In mid-April, several babies aged four or five months were reported dying of COVID-19 in the Russian Novosibirsk region. Meskina, a Russian infectious disease expert and professor at the Department of Pediatrics of the Moscow Regional Clinical Research Institute, said that the new crown virus is dangerous for babies because their immune systems are not yet fully developed. Among children under 1 year of age, 10.6% of cases developed into severe or critical cases.
In Singapore, the group with the highest infection rate of the Olmikeron strain at this stage is that of adolescents, and during the outbreak caused by the Delta strain, the infection is mainly the elderly and working adult groups. Currently, infection rates are highest among children aged 5 to 11 years, followed by adolescents aged 12 to 19 years.
Jin Dongyan, a virology expert at the University of Hong Kong, said in an interview with the Global Times that it is not clear whether the characteristics of the Aomi Kerong variant have led to the increase in the number of infections in children, or some other factors, such as the low proportion of children's new crown vaccination, and the tendency of students to attend classes in confined spaces in autumn and winter.
The Guardian reported in March that the Aumechjung variant is a threat, but less than 30 percent of children aged 5 to 11 in the United States have been vaccinated, and just over half of 12- to 17-year-olds have been vaccinated. Reifman, a public health expert at Boston University, said, "We have never achieved high enough vaccination rates in the United States, and we are far behind other countries, which makes us very vulnerable to persistently high mortality, hospitalization rates, social disruption and economic disruption." ”
Fear of sequelae, Korean parents are the most nervous
The cumulative number of confirmed COVID-19 cases in South Korea has exceeded 16.8 million, accounting for about 1/3 of the total population. According to South Korean media reports, the relaxation of epidemic control has not only led to the diagnosis of a large number of children, but also made many families more worried about whether there are serious sequelae of the new crown pneumonia. According to a survey released by the Korea Health Insurance Review and Evaluation Institute in April, 19.1% of the 21,615 confirmed patients surveyed had traveled to the hospital for treatment due to sequelae.
The view of the Korean medical industry is that in general, cough symptoms after infection with the virus will heal within 3 weeks, and if it exceeds 3 weeks or even more than 8 weeks, it will cause physical fatigue, headaches, urinary incontinence and other complications, and you should seek medical attention in time.
The South Korean media is very concerned about the issue of "long-term coronavirus" among teenagers. After the spread of the Olmikron variant, more and more South Korean parents posted online that "their children are plagued by the sequelae of the new crown pneumonia." The 4-year-old daughter of housewife Jiang Mou was diagnosed with new crown pneumonia and suffered a serious decline in physical strength after being discharged from the hospital. Jiang Mou said: "My daughter used to go outside to play for 6 hours and cried that she wanted to play for a while, and now as long as she plays for two hours, she will ask to go home." My daughter used to be active and enjoyed the outdoors, but now she seems to just want to stay home, which worries me. ”
Zheng Mou, a South Korean middle school student in the second year of junior high school, was diagnosed on November 17 last year, and was isolated at home for 10 days, and has always had mild fever and sore throat symptoms. After the isolation was lifted, Zheng's symptoms of losing his sense of smell and taste lasted for a month, and he felt that all the smells were "bad smells of gasoline", and he could not smell the fragrance when he took the perfume under his eyelids. As his sense of smell gradually recovered, unbearable headaches and eye tenderness struck at the same time, especially "it felt like the eyeballs were about to fall out." In addition, he also has frequent vomiting, physical decline, memory loss and other problems. It takes Zheng 1 hour to memorize the same number of English words than before the infection. Other parents say that their children cannot remember the names of their classmates.
In the panic, there are also media that hope that parents will keep a calm mind. The Han Minh News reported that further research is needed on the root causes of the possibility of whether the new crown pneumonia will cause long-term and permanent damage to children. Kim Duo, a professor of infectious internal medicine at South Korea's SuncheonGo University, said there were no reports showing that the sequelae of Delta and Omi Kerong would show different symptoms, but the former caused more severe patients. A parent of a cured child said: "The teacher reported that the child's memory and concentration decreased significantly after he recovered from illness. Because the child was mild at the time, we didn't care much. But what happens next, we need to look at it more closely. ”
Russian "Izvestia" recently quoted Russian pediatrician and immunologist Protis as saying, "Anyone infected with the new crown will cause damage to health conditions in some way, and the immune system, endocrine system, and nervous system may be affected." But there are also many Russian experts who believe that "it is too early to talk about the sequelae caused by the new crown pneumonia." Severe damage to the lungs, of course, need a recovery period", and stressed that it is more important than ever for adolescents to be vaccinated against COVID-19.
Wang Guangfa, a member of the national health commission's expert group to Wuhan who was infected with the new crown virus and a well-known respiratory expert, told the Global Times reporter that the problem of sequelae should be treated scientifically, and after any disease is obtained, there will be more or less sequelae, and the key is to have a correct understanding of the sequelae of the new crown. First of all, it is clear that the sequelae is not the disease itself, it is the sequelae effect of the disease; second, we have very little research on the sequelae of the new crown pneumonia, especially the long-term sequelae, what exactly it is, we know even less. Therefore, we should not blindly hype the problem of sequelae, but should rationally and objectively study how serious the sequelae of the new crown pneumonia are, and more scientific research may be needed to give answers.
In view of the lessons learned by the elderly, children and other vulnerable groups in some foreign countries in the process of epidemic prevention, Wang Guangfa suggested that from now on, vaccination still has a certain protective effect, and it does play a certain role in preventing serious diseases and deaths.
The phenomenon of "child poverty" in Japan has intensified
Many countries attach great importance to the vaccination of children against COVID-19. As officials of the Ministry of Health in Singapore have repeatedly called on parents to vaccinate children over the age of 5 as soon as possible to avoid turning into severe disease after unfortunate diagnosis. Indonesia has also started vaccinateing children against COVID-19 in December last year.
In late March this year, the Indian capital once relaxed epidemic prevention and control, but less than a month later, the New Delhi government resumed routine symptom screening, temperature detection, campus access control and other epidemic prevention measures in public schools on the grounds of the increasing number of confirmed cases. According to the Times of India, about 1/3 of the confirmed patients who have been treated in hospitals in recent days are children. Gupta, a pediatric pulmonologist at Ganges Hospital, believes that "this wave of epidemics has a greater impact on children than before". Pediatrician Dube said that the clinical manifestations of children's diagnosis are different from those of adults — the initial symptoms are often vomiting, followed by fever and diarrhea, and older children will have headaches. Some experts suggest that parents should remind their children not to relax their self-protection, and suggest that the FDA start work on vaccinate children aged 6 to 12 with homegrown COVID-19 vaccines.
But in some countries, child vaccination has also encountered some problems. The New York Times recently reported that a study by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that unvaccinated children between the ages of 5 and 11 were more likely to suffer from severe illness due to infection with the Omiljung variant, resulting in twice as many hospitalizations as children of the same age who had been vaccinated. The newspaper said that due to factors such as poverty, black children in the United States have low vaccination rates, so they are more likely to be hospitalized severely due to infection.
The impact of the epidemic on Japanese society is multifaceted, and it has made some pre-existing social problems more serious, such as Japan's "child poverty" problem. A national poll in Japan late last year showed that 30 percent of single-parent households could not afford to buy food; 25 percent of parents surveyed said life was "difficult" or "very difficult." The Ryukyu Shin-pao newspaper published an article calling for the epidemic to cause serious problems of "child poverty", and the government should increase child subsidies, reduce tuition fees, and ensure that parents do not lose their jobs due to the epidemic.
The Japanese government is actively promoting child vaccination while providing financial support to families in need. In late February, Japan launched vaccinations against children aged 5 to 11 years, targeting about 7.41 million people. As of 21 April, 854,000 children received the first dose of the vaccine, with a vaccination rate of 11.5%, and 455,000 children received two doses of the vaccine, with a vaccination rate of 6.1%. Obviously, the vaccination rate of children in Japan is not high. Japanese media called on the government to actively publicize and encourage parents to vaccinate their children, after all, only if the vaccination rate is increased can it help to more effectively contain the new crown pneumonia epidemic and better solve the problem of "child poverty".
A public immunologist told the Global Times that from a global perspective, covid-19 vaccination is still relatively safe, and many vaccines are being upgraded.