Nearly 8.5 Million Child COVID-19 Cases in US

In the United States, nearly 8.5 million children have test coronavirus positive since the onset of the pandemic, revealed the latest report of the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) and the Children's Hospital Association.

A total of 8,471,003 child COVID-19 cases had been reported across the country as of January 6, and children represented 17.4 percent of all confirmed cases, according to the report published late Monday.

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‘COVID-19 cases among American children are increasing exponentially.’

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The overall rate was 11,255 cases per 100,000 children in the population, Xinhua news agency reported.

COVID-19 cases among US children are "increasing exponentially," far exceeding the peak of past waves of the pandemic, according to the report.

For the week ending January 6, over 580,000 child COVID-19 cases were reported, a 78 percent increase over the week before, and an almost tripling of case counts from the two weeks prior, according to the AAP.

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Coronavirus is a large positive-strand RNA virus that is surrounded by a protein envelope. The virus obtains its name from the S protein spikes on its surface, which resemble a crown. The overall pattern of increasing coronavirus cases is shown to spike up with the “second wave” of COVID-19.

With spiking effects of the second wave of coronavirus, the best way to keep it at bay is to follow COVID-appropriate safety practices like wearing a mask, regularly cleaning your hands, and coughing into a bent elbow or tissue along with physical distancing (6 feet about 2 arm's length), that may help evade the severity of COVID-19 infection.

This marks the 22nd week in a row child COVID-19 cases in the US are above 100,000. Since the first week of September, there have been over 3.4 million additional child cases, according to the AAP.

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Children accounted for 1.7 to 4.3 percent of total reported hospitalisations, and 0 to 0.27 percent of all COVID-19 deaths, according to the report.

"There is an urgent need to collect more age-specific data to assess the severity of illness related to new variants as well as potential longer-term effects," the AAP said in the report.

Source-IANS

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