'Unprecedented' Omicron Surge Hitting Under-5s: South Africa - The Daily Beast

The “highly transmissible” Omicron variant of coronavirus ripping through South Africa is putting disproportionately large numbers of children under 5 years old in hospitals, a top South African government medical adviser said Friday.

The trend that we’re seeing now, that is different to what we’ve seen before, is a particular increase in hospital admissions in children under 5 years.

She said, for example, that in the city of Tshwane Metro, more than 100 children under the age of 5 were admitted to hospitals with COVID in the first two weeks of the new fourth wave (Nov. 14 to 27).

She said that with adults increasingly vaccinated, children are the ones who are “getting sick and need to be admitted.”.

She added that pediatricians at the Tshwane hospital had told them, anecdotally, that “all” of the children ages 12-18 who were admitted were not vaccinated, even though they were eligible.

She said this showed “the value of vaccination in the adult protecting the children in the homes.”.

He said that while vaccinated people are getting infected, a disproportionate number of those ending up in hospitals are not vaccinated and that the South African hospital system is coping for the time being and has spare capacity