Oregon sees share of coronavirus cases rise in 10-19 age group - OregonLive

New COVID-19 case counts have plummeted in Oregon since late last year, but the state is experiencing a change in who is testing positive.

Nationwide weekly data collected by the American Academy of Pediatrics show a similar rise in the percentage of new cases in the young.

The rate of pediatric COVID “has climbed steadily through the pandemic, which probably represents a real rise in children getting infected relative to older populations, not that the virus is getting more severe in children,” O’Leary said, although the increase last spring and summer probably represented added testing capacity.

In Oregon, the last state in the country to vaccinate seniors living in the community, health officials have administered at least one dose to more than 540,000 people aged 65 and over, according to the Oregon Health Authority.

Case counts have fallen farthest in those aged 20 to 50, which includes a large fraction of those vaccinated in Oregon first: medical workers and teachers.

Chunhuei Chi, professor of international health at Oregon State University and director of its Center for Global Health.

OSU saw a substantial rise in COVID cases on its Corvallis campus in February, although the numbers have fallen in recent weeks.

Chi said he’s talked to students who’d caught COVID multiple times, and said mild cases of COVID may convey a much shorter period of natural resistance.

COVID case counts at Portland State University have largely followed trends in the city, said Dr.

Disentangling the impact of collegiate COVID cases is hard, but a national collection of case counts among the young conducted by the academy provides a natural experiment.

In Oregon, cases among children have often peaked a week later than in adults, a trend that appears to reflect patterns of testing (children get tested after an adult tests positive) and transmission.

Oregon’s most recent report on COVID in children, from January, found that 47% of cases in children came from household spread as opposed to 20% in adults.

But that’s not happened: To date, the trend has persisted in Oregon even after case counts have stopped falling as fast.

Federal hospitalization records in both Oregon and Washington have errors in the count of children admitted with suspected COVID every day for at least the last four months.

19, Oregon never had more than 15 children admitted with suspected COVID in a day.

Department of Health and Human Services, acknowledged the issue and said a data quality team was reviewing it.

It said that the lack of race data in case counts under the Trump administration was the initial focus.

Jonathan Modie, a spokesman for Oregon’s Health Authority, declined to say what the state’s reporting status was or shed any light on where the erroneous data came from.

But these data are absent from state files and not usable in facility-level files, which redact patient counts less than four.

Just a fraction of confirmed COVID cases are being sequenced in Oregon right now.

At Oregon Health & Science University scientists aim for 200 or 250 sequences a week; researchers at the University of Oregon are analyzing 25, though its lab could ramp up, a spokeswoman said.

The New York Times estimated Oregon has sequenced less than 2% of cumulative cases to date.