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One age group is still “resisting” the improvement in the health situation linked to Covid-19 in the hospital: 10-19 years. 92 of them are hospitalized on Wednesday, as many as the day before but twelve more than last Friday. The continuous decline observed in the last two weeks in all other categories is therefore still far from starting among adolescents. 17 of these 92 patients are in intensive care. Again, this number is still not decreasing and this is an exception.
These figures are obviously very low when compared to the almost 27,000 patients hospitalized in total (6,500 fewer than the peak reached on November 16), of which just under 3,500 in intensive care. It is also little given that there are 300 pediatric wards in France. But we can still ask ourselves why this still doesn’t decrease (without ruling out the possibility of a simple statistical bug).
A longer delay before admission
Robert Cohen, an infectious disease pediatrician at the Créteil intercommunal hospital, sees three possible reasons. First of all, children and adolescents are likely to generate pediatric multisystem inflammatory disease (PIMS) if infected with the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus. If this situation is rare – “13.5 cases per million inhabitants in the population under 18”, indicates the public health France -, it is established that the symptoms that may require hospitalization are delayed.
“During the first wave of the outbreak, it was estimated that PIMS occurred with an average delay of 4-5 weeks after infection,” writes Public Health France in its weekly epidemiological bulletin of November 26. “Most of the symptoms in the case of contamination are completely benign, but there can be more severe diseases of this type with a delay of a few weeks,” said Robert Cohen, newly elected president of the National Pediatric Council.
As new positive cases in children between the ages of 10 and 19 have been declining since the beginning of November, as in all other age groups, we can assume that the number of young hospitalized patients will eventually decline in the coming days. While underlining that “children are very little represented among patients hospitalized for Covid-19 and among deaths”, the Health Agency reports that “a new evaluation of pediatric multisystem inflammatory syndromes will be presented shortly”.
Small confined teenagers
However, we observe that the peak of positive cases in adolescents was reached a few days later than in the other categories. And this is where the second possible explanation comes into play: Since colleges and high schools (in part) remained open during the second block that began on October 30, teenagers were among the populations least affected by these restrictions. . “Obviously, this has generated significant mixing and adolescents are an age group where the virus has circulated well,” says Robert Cohen. Therefore, it is not necessarily surprising that hospitals are slow to “empty” these young patients.
Furthermore, even if we do not have the daily number of hospital admissions by age group, it can be deducted from the balance of occupied beds, deaths (only five between 10-19 years from the start of the pandemic) and daily home visits. Even on this indicator, the curve still struggles to go down for adolescents, stagnating at around 10 hospitalizations every day.
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Finally, the pediatrician puts forward one last element, which cannot be quantified at this stage. Today many young people come to the hospital for other treatments, in particular for increasingly frequent psychological difficulties. “They are all tested and those who test positive can be classified as having Covid-19,” he says. This could, at the edge, also vary the curve of the number of adolescents admitted to hospital after a coronavirus infection.
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