More kids hospitalized with Covid, but experts aren’t sure if they’re sicker,

Kali Cook was 4 when she died after contracting Covid-19 last week in Galveston County, Texas, becoming the youngest resident of the county to die from the disease.

“She was so funny and sassy,” her mother, Karra Harwood, told The Galveston County Daily News of the little girl who liked playing with frogs and worms. “She was just so pretty and full of life.”

According to her family, Kali had no previously diagnosed health conditions and was found to be in good health by a doctor recently, Dr. Philip Keiser, the Galveston County local health authority, told NBC News. She began developing respiratory symptoms after other family members became sick with Covid and the next morning she was found dead. An autopsy is being conducted.

Keiser said Kali’s death was “really shocking,” but it should not have been, given that 40 percent of the county’s cases are people under 20 and the single largest demographic is children under 10. 

“This has our community all shaken up. How could this happen? Why could this happen?” he said. “But in some ways again when you step back and you look and see how delta can spread very rapidly and kids now are one of the largest unvaccinated groups in the country, it shouldn’t be surprising to us, even though it was quite shocking.”

As of Sept. 9, nearly 5.3 million children had been diagnosed with Covid-19, representing 15.5 percent of all cases, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics. More than 243,000 cases were reported from Sept. 2 to Sept 9., the second-highest number of child cases in a week since the beginning of the pandemic, representing nearly 29 percent of the weekly reported cases, according to AAP. The highest number of cases was just one week prior, with 251,781 new cases. The AAP reported that after declining in early summer, “child cases have increased exponentially, with nearly 500,000 cases in the past 2 weeks.”

Despite the explosion in cases, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the pediatric specialists and clinical investigators studying the disease still do not have evidence that delta causes more severe infections in children and adolescents.

But experts are examining “red flags that could indicate greater disease severity in specific segments of the pediatric population,” said Dr. Jim Versalovic, the interim pediatrician in chief at Texas Children’s Hospital.

“For example, we are seeing Covid pneumonia and acute respiratory distress in infants and young children,” Versalovic said, adding that some cases were due to respiratory syncytial virus (RSV)-Covid co-infections with a greater hospitalization rate. 

“So, it can be difficult to understand whether we have more severe disease due to delta or co-infections,” he said.

A definitive answer could still be months away, Versalovic said, though he’s hopeful there will be “more clarity about this topic during calendar year 2021.”

“We need more time to evaluate the data across regions, age groups, different underlying medical conditions, and longer-term outcomes,” he said. 

“These questions can be challenging, and note that this delta surge is only 2 months old,” he said. “We can…