In late August, 39 percent of all Tennessee Covid-19 cases were in children (aged 0-18 years), and Shelby County had been hit the hardest.
At that time, there were 14,329 kids with Covid. About 60 percent of those infected kids were 11 to 18 years old (meaning many of those could have been vaccinated). Since the pandemic began, Shelby County has seen more sick kids than anywhere else, more than 21,000. (Compare that to Nashville’s next-highest kids’ case count at about 13,300.)
Kids weren’t immune to Covid’s alpha variant; many got sick. But the Delta variant sent case counts though the roof, thousands of students to quarantine, and record numbers of kids to hospitals here. Covid complications had 27 children in Le Bonheur Children’s Hospital in the last week of August, seven of them in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) and 21 in acute care. Those figures had been climbing but had leveled off.
Dr. Diego Hijano
Dr. Aditya H. Gaur
Doctors have speculated that the virus didn’t mutate to be more aggressive in children. The variant is just way easier to get and to give, and with no vaccines for children until recently, it spread through an unprotected population.
Delta’s rapid rise, especially in children, surprised the world, particularly those in the U.S. Covid wasn’t over in June here. But case counts fell to lows unseen since the very early days of the pandemic, thanks to high vaccination rates.
Leaders began to breathe easier. Much of the response machinery began to be shelved. The county mask mandate was removed, for example, and the never-used ($51 million) overflow hospital was closed in the former Commercial Appeal building. But this wasn’t hubris. It seemed to be kind of over. Delta’s surprise came not just for government leaders but for scientists, too.
“I certainly was not expecting the way it is playing out,” said Dr. Diego Hijano, an infectious diseases expert with St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. “We always knew the virus would move through the vulnerable and the unvaccinated. Obviously, it makes sense that all the kids that are unvaccinated are getting infected, and that’s driving a lot of what we’re seeing. But I did not expect things to change so dramatically.”
In terrible timing, Delta rose as kids were on their ways back to school. Remote learning was off the table for most in Shelby County. Face masks were made optional across the state by an executive order by Tennessee Governor Bill Lee. Going to school, it seemed, came with no guarantee for complete safety.
However, another state order more recently allowed schools to offer a virtual option. Two lawsuits — both from Shelby County — are challenging Lee’s mask opt-out.
As of late August, Shelby County Schools reported 857 total student cases of Covid-19 and 123 staff cases. However, more than half of those cases were reported in one week, from August 20th-26th.
What’s a parent to do? Le Bonheur and the Memphis-based University of Tennessee Health Science Center (UTHSC) issued must-read back-to-school recommendations, updated with the latest guidelines from federal, state, and local governments.
For Dr. Aditya H. Gaur, a St. Jude infectious disease expert, “Science today says wearing masks will make a difference.” And kids can lead the way. He remembered a St. Jude colleague once asked his daycare-aged child about how to get ready to go to school.
“Going to the daycare means putting on your socks and shoes, and it means putting on your mask,” Gaur said. “So that child has grown up in a pandemic and the mask is similar to his socks.
“If his parents can role model … and normalize it by saying this is what is needed, that child is going to do it. I think if we, as adults, can be similar — which is the mask guidance is back on — we’ll wear the mask. If that’s how we take it, our kids will wear the mask.”
Vaccines for kids aged 5 and up are on the way. And the pressure for them is growing.
In mid-August, a bi-partisan group of nearly 100 U.S. House members signed a letter urging the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for information on the drug and when it may be available.
In January, Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, predicted a children’s vaccine by spring or summer 2021. Asked recently, Fauci pushed that timeline to late fall or early winter.