Scientists have found: Omicron hits children’s lungs stronger than Delta

New research shows children are at risk

With the advent of Omicron, the world began to breathe a little calmer: the coronavirus infection proceeds much easier with it. And yet this does not apply to children. There have already been several studies in the world that have shown that “light” Omicron is more difficult for children to tolerate than adults. And now, studies by scientists from South Korea have been added to the stack of evidence, which have shown in numbers that the health of children who fall ill with Omicron suffers much more compared to Delta. First of all, it concerns the respiratory system. Another new work, this time by British scientists, showed that lung infections suffered in childhood double the chances of dying from respiratory failure in the future.

Korean scientists published the paper “Clinical characteristics and outcomes in children infected with SARS-CoV-2 during the period of dominance of Delta and Omicron variants in Korea”. The study was conducted among hospitalized patients under the age of 18 with laboratory-confirmed SARS-CoV-2 infection at five university hospitals in South Korea. The study periods were divided into a Delta wave (from August 23, 2021 to January 2, 2022) and an Omicron wave (from January 30 to March 31, 2022). By the way, with the arrival of the Omicron variant in this country, the incidence of COVID-19 has reached record levels: as of December 31, 2021, the cumulative number of cases of COVID-19 among children (0-19 years old) in Korea was 113,348. However, from January 1 to On March 31, 2022, there were over 3.3 million (!) pediatric cases.

In the course of the work, the condition of 612 children was analyzed (211 were hospitalized with Delta and 401 with Omicron). The median weekly number of pediatric hospitalizations during the Delta and Omicron periods was 10 and 46, respectively. Over the entire study period, the proportion of small patients with severe disease (moderate, severe and critical severity) was 21.2% and 11.8%, respectively. But at the same time, compared with the Delta period at the time of Omicron, the proportion of patients with moderately severe disease increased significantly in the age groups 0-4 years (14.2% vs. 3.4%) and 5-11 years (18.6% vs. 4.2%). The proportion of patients with croup (11.0% vs. 0.5%) and seizures (13.2% vs. 2.8%) also increased significantly.

During the Delta period, the risk of developing severe disease was higher among patients with obesity and neurological disease. However, the presence of neurological disease was the only risk factor for serious illness during the Omicron period. “The overall severity of the disease during the omicron-dominated period, especially moderate severity, increased in parallel with an increase in the number of young children with croup or febrile seizures requiring supplemental oxygen. There was no significant difference in the proportions of severe and critical COVID-19 over the two periods, and most severe or critically ill patients had comorbidities,” the authors note.

The authors concluded that compared with the Delta period, the proportion of young children and patients with complex comorbidities was higher in the micron period. First of all, this applies to children with neurological diseases: Omicron was much more difficult for them than Delta. By the way, even before that, doctors noted that neurological disorders increase the risk of developing serious illness in other respiratory viral infections, such as influenza or respiratory syncytial virus. In addition, children with neurological disorders were 5 to 7 times more likely to be hospitalized for respiratory infections than children without them.

…Similar studies previously conducted in the United States have shown that the incidence of COVID-19 caused by the Omicron variant was 5-8 times higher than the incidence of COVID-19 caused by the Delta variant in children under 5 years of age. Although disease severity was lower with the Omicron variant, the daily rolling average of COVID-19 cases, emergency room visits, and hospitalizations increased rapidly during the Omicron period. The high volume of outpatients and hospitalizations caused by high levels of virus transmission in a short period has strained local health systems.

Laboratory diagnostics doctor Alexander Solovyov considers the findings of Korean scientists that with Omicron in children the respiratory tract is more likely to suffer, alarming, because any respiratory tract infections in early childhood affect lung development and lung health throughout life: “According to a national cohort study conducted in the UK – lower respiratory tract infections in early childhood (less than 2 years of age) almost double the risk of premature death from respiratory infections in adulthood.

The mentioned study was also recently published – in the authoritative journal Lancet: it covered 5362 people, who were followed since 1972 (the maximum follow-up time was 47.9 years). In general, everything is sad: those who had SARS in early childhood with lung damage had a higher, more precisely two-fold risk of death from respiratory diseases by the age of 73.

As pediatrician Mikhail Kruglikov explained to MK, Omicron much more often, in comparison with other variants of coronavirus, leads to inflammation of the upper respiratory tract, which is accompanied by a sharp, barking cough: “This is called “croup.” In addition, Omicron is much more common in children than in adults, causes vomiting and diarrhea.What consequences this virus inflicts on the body in a global sense, we have yet to learn.As long as scientists around the world are monitoring it, and any scientific work on this infection is important because it brings us closer to understanding how to fight infection.”