Surge overwhelms US hospitals amid rising toll on kids

EMS medics from the Houston Fire Department prepare a Covid-19 positive girl, age 2, for transport to a hospital on August 25 in Houston, Texas. Pic/AFP

Kentucky and Texas joined a growing list of states that are seeing record numbers of hospitalized Covid-19 patients in a surge that is overwhelming doctors and nurses and afflicting more children.

Intensive care units around the nation are packed with patients extremely ill with the coronavirus. Nationwide, Covid-19 deaths are more than 1,100 a day, the highest level since mid-March, and new cases per day are averaging over 152,000, turning the clock back to the end of January. As of early this week, the number of people in the hospital with the coronavirus was around 85,000, a level not seen since early February.

The surge is largely fueled by the highly contagious delta variant among people who are unvaccinated. Doctors have pleaded with communities to get inoculated to spare overburdened hospitals. They have sounded the alarm about the growing toll of the variant on kids and young adults. Children now make up 36% of Tennessee's reported cases, marking yet another sobering milestone in the state's battle against the virus, Health Commissioner Lisa Piercey said Wednesday. She said the state had 14,000 pediatric cases in past seven days, a 57% increase over the previous week. Nearly 30% of new cases in South Carolina in past two weeks have been in people 20 and under. At the same time in 2020, 17% of cases were in children and teens, state officials said.

Half of hospitalised patients show persisting symptoms after a year: Lancet study

Around half the people hospitalised with Covid-19 experience at least one persistent symptom up to 12 months after the infection, according to a study published in The Lancet journal on Friday. The research on 1,276 patients from Wuhan, China, shows that around one in three people still experienced shortness of breath after 12 months, while lung impairments persisted in some patients, especially those who had experienced the most severe illness with Covid-19. The study findings suggest that recovery for some patients will take longer than one year, and this should be taken into account when planning delivery of healthcare services post-pandemic.

Covid bigger blood clot threat than vaccines

A coronavirus infection presents a much higher risk of developing a blood clot than the first dose of either the Oxford/AstraZeneca or the Pfizer/BioNTech jab, a large study led by the University of Oxford said on Friday. The findings showed although there was an increased risk of having a blood clot after having the first doses of either vaccine, it was much greater in someone who had tested positive for Covid-19 caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

6,55,952
No. of new cases reported globally in the past 24 hours

21,37,52,662
Total no. of cases worldwide

44,59,381
Total no. of deaths worldwide

Source: WHO/Johns Hopkins

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