NBC News Headline: "Child Covid hospitalizations are up, especially in 5 states."

Paragraph 8: "[W]e’re definitely seeing an increase in cases. However, we’re really not seeing an increase in children who are hospitalized FOR Covid or in the intensive care unit for Covid."

This NBC article is yet another example of misleading headlines that distort the pubic’s perception of covid (it’s what some people would call “misinformation”). Here are just a few more out-of-context, fear-inducing sentences from the article (emphasis added throughout):

• “In the last four weeks, the average number of children hospitalized with Covid-19 jumped 52 percent, from a low of 1,270 on Nov. 29 to 1,933 on Sunday.”

• “In the same time period, adult Covid hospitalizations increased 29 percent, suggesting that pediatric hospitalizations rose at nearly twice the rate.”

• “The number of kids hospitalized with Covid has more than doubled in 10 states.”

• “Dr. Buddy Creech, a pediatric infectious disease expert at the Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, Tennessee, said the contagiousness of omicron serves as the latest reminder that children are not immune to Covid. ‘We saw similar things happen when the delta variant came along,’ he said. ‘We had taken for granted that children were relatively under-affected by Covid, and we saw an uptick in the number of children infected and therefore admitted to the hospital with complications.’”

• “In general, pediatric Covid cases are mild compared with those of adults. But kids can develop serious complications, including long Covid and an inflammatory syndrome that reaches several organs, called MIS-C. The syndrome is most common in children ages 5 to 11.” [coincidentally, 5-11 is also the age range most recently authorized to be injected with the covid vaccines]

Without more context, parents would understandably believe that covid (and specifically the omicron variant) is posing a much greater threat to children. But the devil is in the details that are tucked away in paragraphs 8-10. Here’s the full context (emphasis added again):

However, he said, his hospital has seen a lot of kids test positive for Covid without necessarily showing symptoms or getting sick.

"We test anybody who’s admitted to the hospital for whatever reason to see whether or not they have Covid, and we’re definitely seeing an increase in cases. However, we’re really not seeing an increase in children who are hospitalized for Covid or in the intensive care unit for Covid," Offit said.

According to the Department of Health and Human Services, patients are counted among those with Covid if they are suspected of having or laboratory-confirmed positive for the disease, even if they were not originally admitted to the hospital for that reason.

So what does all this mean? Many of these children are hospitalized WITH covid, not from or because of covid. And as long as we are testing “anybody who’s admitted to the hospital for whatever reason to see whether or not they have Covid,” there are ALWAYS going to be more cases. But this does NOT mean that more children are actually getting sicker from covid. Indeed, as the article says, they are counted as covid hospitalizations “even if they were not originally admitted to the hospital for that reason.” I plan to post more soon on just how little risk children (still) face from covid compared to other threats, but it should be reiterated now that it poses SIGNIFICANTLY less risk than seasonal flu.

Why would NBC lead with a headline that unnecessarily stokes fear and that distorts the evidence presented in the article? I don’t know all the reasons. What I do know is that if we tested every incoming hospital patient for RSV, flu, or even the common cold, we could have a “casedemic” of virtually anything. This is why distinguishing between hospitalizations and deaths with covid versus from covid is still so very, very important if we are to accurately understand the true risks of the disease.