Texas Children has 5800 kids with Covid in the hospital edit: oops 783 over 30+ days

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Texas children and children’s hospitals are under siege from two viruses: RSV and COVID-19

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Correction, Aug. 12, 2021: An earlier version of this story overstated the number of children who have been hospitalized in Texas recently with COVID-19. The story said over 5,800 children had been hospitalized during a seven-day period in August, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That number correctly referred to children hospitalized with COVID-19 since the pandemic began. In actuality, 783 children were admitted to Texas hospitals with COVID-19 between July 1 and Aug. 9 of this year.

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Estefani López’s 11-month-old baby was struggling to breathe. The little girl, Ava Rivera, had contracted COVID-19 and began having seizures. Then her pulse weakened. Her mom couldn’t feel her taking breaths anymore.

López rushed her to an emergency room where the staff began initial treatments, putting tubes down her throat to pump her lungs with oxygen. But the baby’s condition required care at a pediatric hospital, and none of the ones in the Houston area could take her in. They were all full.

Instead, López had to watch as hospital staff placed her baby in a helicopter to be airlifted 150 miles away to Temple for emergency care at the nearest children’s hospital with space. López spent the next three hours driving to the hospital, praying her baby would survive.

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More children are being treated in Texas hospitals for COVID-19 than ever before. But there’s a second factor that is putting pediatric hospitals on the path to being overwhelmed: an unseasonable outbreak of respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV, a highly contagious virus that can require hospitalization mostly among children 5 years and younger and especially infants.

During the last year, RSV was largely dormant, which experts believe was due to people masking up during the pandemic. Now, in just the last several weeks, thousands of Texas children have tested positive for the virus.

In addition, the delta variant of COVID-19 appears to affect unvaccinated children more often than previous variants. It’s unclear if children are also becoming sicker from it than from other variants of COVID-19. And with the regular flu season approaching, medical experts are concerned over how hospital capacity could be affected.

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