JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – Last week, one-quarter of the 150,118 new COVID-19 infections diagnosed in Florida was of someone younger than 19 years old.
Children and teenagers currently have a higher coronavirus positivity rate than any other age group in Florida and the delta variant has pediatricians, including an infectious disease specialist at Wolfson Children’s Hospital, concerned about young people.
“Just think about this: The regular coronavirus, if one person gets infected, they may be able to infect two other people. The delta variant, if one person gets infected, they can infect eight people,” Dr. Mobeen Rathore said. “It’s a much more contagious virus, so, as a result, in close quarters such as in schools, the opportunity for the virus to infect more children is much higher with the delta variant than the previous.”
Rathore said Wolfson, where he works, there were about twice as many children admitted to the hospital in July than the previous peak in January, and so far August is on track to surpass that number. Tuesday morning, as this interview was being done, there were 19 pediatric patients at his hospital, with five in intensive care.
“The peak was 22 (patients), and that was the week that the CDC reported there were 203 admitted to the hospital nationwide and 22 were in Jacksonville,” he said. “That speaks volumes of what’s happening in our community. The admissions to the hospital are just a signal, it’s a surrogate marker that a lot of other kids in the community that are infected.”
Rathore spoke in favor of requiring students to wear masks at Monday’s contentious Duval County School Board meeting that ended with the board tightening its mask requirement to require a doctor’s note to opt-out, beginning Sept. 7. But he said masks are just one piece of a good prevention strategy.
“A vast body of literature suggests that, yes, masks do prevent infection when they’re done in suggestion in conjunction with other mitigating layers such as social distancing, good hand hygiene .... good ventilation, good testing and contract tracing,” Dr. Mobeen Rathore said. “They have been done as a group, you cannot take just masks.”
Watch Jennifer Waugh’s full interview above.