Children under the age of 5 are not eligible for Covid vaccination. Doctors have this advice to protect them during the rise of omicron

The number of hospitalizations for covid among children is increasing, and one age group is currently particularly vulnerable: children under 5 years of age.

Infants up to 4 years of age are the only age group in the U.S. not suitable for vaccination, as a highly contagious version of omicron is spreading across communities.

Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said earlier this month that there were no signs that omicron would make children sicker compared to previous versions. According to her, the increase in hospitalizations is likely due to an unprecedented rate of transmission across the country.

About 7 out of every 100,000 children under the age of 5 have been hospitalized with Covid since Jan. 8, more than twice as many as in December, according to CDC data from 250 hospitals in 14 states.

White House Chief Medical Adviser dr. Anthony Fauci said on Wednesday that children are much less likely to suffer from severe Covida disease compared to adults, but the risk is nothing.

“We have a lot of kids, if you look at children’s hospitals across the country who are seriously ill with Covid-19 who require hospitalization, some are even dying,” Fauci said.

Dr. Roberta DeBiasi said most of the children admitted to Children’s National Hospital in Washington, DC, with Covid during the omicron wave are under 5 years old.

“Mostly it’s a group that hasn’t been vaccinated, that’s under 5 years old,” said DeBiasi, who heads the hospital’s infectious disease department.

Dr. Andi Shane, head of the Department of Infectious Diseases at Children’s Health Care in Atlanta, said many parents understandably feel a loss of control as a pandemic drags on with recurring waves of infections.

However, Shane said parents should know that they are not helpless against the virus and that they can take practical steps to protect their children. Although children under the age of 5 cannot get vaccines, parents can protect them by ensuring that every other eligible person in the family is fully vaccinated and receives booster vaccination, say doctors who spoke to CNBC. Currently, everyone aged 12 and over is eligible Pfizer in BioNTechbooster dose at least five months after their second dose.

People who are vaccinated and fortified have up to 75% protection against symptomatic omicron infection, a real-world study by the British Health Security Agency has found.

Protecting babies and toddlers from Covid is especially challenging because there are so few tools available to protect them, said Dr. Allison Bartlett, an infectious disease specialist at Comer Children’s Hospital in Chicago. They are not eligible for the vaccine, the CDC strongly discourages wearing masks to children under the age of 2, and the FDA has not approved Covid tests without a prescription for them.

“They have three strikes against them in terms of preventing infection,” Bartlett said. But parents can protect them by using a full set of mitigation measures that reduce the risk of family members infecting the virus and spreading it to the vulnerable, she said.

“For everyone else in the household and in contact with children under the age of 5, it is all the more necessary to wear their own masks and socially distance and limit their activities outside the home and take all other steps to reduce the risk of helping cocoon and protect a child, ”Bartlett said.

Shane said many parents are understandably tired of the pandemic and want their children and families to have normal social interactions again.

“It’s very challenging with these jumps that we have every few months that we have to step back and go into not doing the things we really want to do,” Shane said. “But we really need to do this for a short time, at least until we’re all vaccinated and strengthened.”

Fauci said the FDA could approve the vaccine for children under the age of 5 next month, though he said there was no guarantee that it would happen. Younger children are likely to need three doses because two injections in Pfizer’s clinical trials did not elicit an adequate immune response in children aged 2 to 4 years. Pfizer said that during its trials at doses for young children, which are 3 micrograms each much lower than doses for adults, it found no safety concerns.