421 - Why Omicron Is Such "A Different Animal" When It Comes to COVID and Kids
Public Health On Call
The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
4.6 • 644 Ratings
🗓️ 24 January 2022
⏱️ 14 minutes
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Summary
Although the majority of children who catch COVID recover without incident, some progress to multi-system inflammatory syndrome (MIS-C), thousands wind up in the ICU, and nearly 1,000 American children have died. Mark Kline, Physician-in-Chief, Senior Vice President and Chief Medical Officer of Children's Hospital New Orleans talks with Stephanie Desmon about why omicron is such "a different animal," what's next for vaccine trials for kids under five, and how Louisiana is taking big steps to protect children with vaccination mandates.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Season 5 of Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. |
| 0:13.0 | I'm Joshua Sharfstein, Vice Dean for Public Health Practice and Community Engagement, and a former |
| 0:19.1 | health commissioner here in Baltimore, Maryland. |
| 0:21.7 | Our goal with this podcast is to bring scientific evidence and experience to shed light on critical |
| 0:27.5 | health issues. If you have questions or ideas for us, please send an email to public health |
| 0:33.0 | question at jhhhu.edu. That's public health question at jhhut.edu for future podcast episodes. |
| 0:42.8 | Hi, I'm Lindsay Smith-Rogers, producer of public health on call. Today, Stephanie Desmond |
| 0:47.5 | talks to Dr. Mark Klein, chief medical officer at Children's Hospital of New Orleans, about the real |
| 0:53.7 | risk COVID-19 presents to |
| 0:55.4 | children and how low vaccination rates among those five and up are keeping too many of them |
| 1:01.2 | vulnerable to infection. Let's listen. Dr. Mark Klein, thank you for joining me. I'm so happy to be |
| 1:09.1 | here. Thank you. So we've heard a lot since the start of COVID |
| 1:13.9 | that COVID doesn't really impact kids as much as it impacts adults and that COVID in kids is |
| 1:21.2 | basically harmless. But now we're hearing that's really not the case and we're seeing that during |
| 1:26.2 | Omicron. What are you seeing? |
| 1:28.7 | Well, I think you summarized it. You know, we've spent most of this pandemic rebutting myths. |
| 1:34.1 | Initially, people said the virus is essentially harmless for children. And they said, |
| 1:40.1 | if there's any harm at all, it's only for children who have underlying medical conditions. |
| 1:45.8 | If they get sick, they won't require hospitalization. They certainly won't die. But here we are. |
| 1:51.7 | About two years into the pandemic, we know that about a third of the children who are hospitalized with COVID today, I have no underlying medical conditions. |
| 2:03.9 | We know that nearly a thousand American children have died of COVID. |
| 2:08.3 | We know that many thousands more have been hospitalized. |
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