NEW ORLEANS — At Children's Hospital New Orleans, there is an increase in the number of kids needing treatment for COVID-19.
Roughly 10 days ago, there were two patients. On Monday, there were 14 — including three in the intensive care unit. Furthermore, well over half of the visits to the emergency room over the last week have been for COVID-related illnesses, according to Dr. Mark Kline, Chief Medical Officer at Children’s Hospital.
And Dr. Kline is predicting it will only get worse.
“I am expecting over the next couple weeks we are going to see a substantial increase in the number of hospitalized children with COVID,” Dr. Kline said.
It isn't just the hospital seeing a back up. Dr. Kline says primary care clinics have also been swamped.
“The number of patients we are seeing in our community settings right now I would say is higher than they were during the delta surge this past summer,” he said.
The increase in younger patients at Children's Hospital comes as classes resume at NOLA Public Schools. On Monday, the district announced guidelines, including that masks be worn at all times on school grounds, indoors and outdoors and that social distancing be extended to 6 feet whenever possible. These changes come on the heels of the decision to have all students ages 5-and-up vaccinated by February, a mandate that mirrors the requirement for kids to enter restaurants and other businesses in New Orleans.
“As a school system, we know it’s so important for our students to be vaccinated because we know that’s how we continue to preserve in-person learning,” said NOLA Public Schools Superintendent Dr. Henderson Lewis.
As school starts up again — all students and staff are also being encouraged to take a Covid-19 test to help track and prevent any community spread in schools.
“Just like we did during Hurricane Ida, when we knew everybody had been with family and evacuated to other places and maybe not masking as well as they wanted, we reopened testing,” said Tiffany Delcour, the chief of operations at NOLA Public Schools. “We are doing the same thing as we enter the Spring semester after the holiday break.”
Kline applauds NOLA Public Schools for the rules, but he still has fears the Omicron variant will spread even quicker once classes get underway.
“I don’t think we’ve ever seen anything like Omicron in terms of transmissibility, it’s ability to spread across the community,” Dr. Kline said. “I do worry having a school resume session right now is really unfortunate timing.”
► Get breaking news from your neighborhood delivered directly to you by downloading the new FREE WWL-TV News app now in the IOS App Store or Google Play.