The COVID Digest, 22Aug2022

Back to school = more COVID-19

Last week I wrote about promising trends in the COVID-19 data for Georgia and throughout the country that indicated the most recent wave had crested. However, I pointed out a big caveat - we hadn’t yet seen the effects of back to school in a time of virtually no pandemic precautions. Well, we can now see some of that effect. Georgia and many other states start school in late July or early August, among the earliest in the country. So what we see there could be a warning of what might happen elsewhere.

Last week, Georgia saw a 3% increase in the weekly case total compared to the previous week. A 3% rise isn’t a huge deal. But what’s interesting is that cases went down for every age group except for kids 1-17. In fact, there were big, big increases for the K-12 age groups. In fact, cases for the 5-9 and 10-17 age groups roughly doubled in the past two weeks, which is right around when school started.

Using the same 8 week timeline for each age group, we can also look at weekly hospitalization totals for COVID-19. We do see a rise in hospital admissions for 5-17 year olds. Thankfully these numbers aren’t as large as for older age groups. But all the same, I don’t think we want to see hospital admissions jump 153% over 14 days as they have for 10-17 year olds.

What we really don’t want is a repeat of the Delta wave last year that was the deadliest wave to date for Georgia’s K-12 aged children.

Of note, according to HHS data, the proportion of children 5-11 who are fully vaccinated in Georgia is only 17.5% and only 8.9% of those 17.5% have received a booster dose (fully up to date). For teens 12-17, 44% of the population in Georgia is fully vaccinated and of those, 19.7% are boosted (fully up to date). Granted, Georgia has come a long way in a year. Around this time last year, the proportion of 12-17 year olds who were fully vaccinated was only 22%. So the fully vaccinated population this year is twice as high.

My bigger worry is what happens as these K-12 aged kids get sick (which we can already see is happening in greater numbers) and then take that illness home. They can pass it on to their family and caregivers. Additionally, with so many people believing the pandemic is over, parents might be less likely to test their symptomatic children and, worse yet, they might send their sick kid back to school while believing their symptoms are due to allergies or a common cold. It is possible that amplification of disease in K-12 schools could result in a renewed wave of illness among adults. I think what remains to be seen is whether there is sufficient immunity among the adult population to ward off a potential resurgence of illness.

We can begin to see a similar trend on a national level. The graph below comes from the HHS Community Profile Report. It shows test positivity for each age group. Test positivity should ideally be at or below 5% as an indication that existing testing capacity is sufficient to not miss many cases. Test capacity has been pretty stable over the last few months. So if test positivity is going up, it means we are missing more cases because there are more cases circulating - not because test capacity went down. Two of the gold colored lines (solid and long dash) are for the K-12 aged population. You can see that test positivity is rising sharply for these age groups nationwide.

So we will want to pay attention to what happens over the next several weeks, both to the pediatric population and those who might be their parents (25-44 year olds).

That’s it for now, I’ll be back on Wednesday I hope! It’s a busy time getting ready for the new academic year.

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Unless otherwise stated, all data presented are publicly available from the Georgia Department of Public Health and the Georgia Geospatial Information Office. Graphs and images that were not produced by me are linked to the original source if you click on them. Thank you for your support of the COVID Digest.

My Ph.D. is in Medical Microbiology and Immunology and I am Chair of the Division of Natural Sciences and Mathematics at the University of Saint Mary. I've worked at places like Creighton University, the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention and Mercer University School of Medicine. All thoughts are my professional opinion, do not represent the views or opinions of my employer and should not be considered medical advice.