COVID-19’s omicron variant appears to be affecting children under age 5 in a new way: a harsh, barking cough known as croup.
are well-known to doctors, who have had decades of experience treating the conditions.
Dr. Amy Edwards, a pediatric infectious disease expert at University Hospitals Rainbow Babies & Children’s Hospital in Cleveland, agreed.“As pediatricians, seeing more kids with croup and bronchiolitis is oddly reassuring,” she said, “because we’ve been dealing with those conditions for our entire careers.”
Croup may require a few days of steroids, but often goes away on its own. Sometimes kids with bronchiolitis need oxygen support or breathing treatments, Edwards said, before generally recovering completely.Edwards and others want to reassure parents that the vast majority of young children with COVID-19 are likely to have mild illness. But it is possible that some children, even previously healthy ones, can develop serious complications that require hospitalization.
Vaccines are one of the best ways to protect against infection, but those shots are not expected any time soon for the youngest children.clinical trials, predicted a rollout of vaccines for the youngest children no earlier than this summer. Versalovic of Texas Children’s, one of the sites for Pfizer-BioNTech’s pediatric clinical trials, also said he did not expect any early childhood vaccines until later this year.
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