Omicron Was More Severe for Unvaccinated Children in 5-to-11 Age Group, Study Shows

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported on Tuesday that unvaccinated children from 5 to 11 years old were hospitalized with Covid at twice the rate of vaccinations during the winter Omicron variant surge.

The vaccine helps keep children out of the hospital with Covid, despite the shots losing some of their effectiveness at stopping infections from the Omicron variant.

The C.D.C. report offered some of the strongest evidence to date that Black children are more exposed to severe illness from Covid if they don't get childhood vaccinations.

Black children in the 5- to-11 age group accounted for about a third of unvaccinated children in the study, the largest of any racial group, and made up roughly a third of overall Covid-related hospitalizations within the age group.

Estimates from 2020 show that Black children make up about 14 percent of U.S. residents from 5 to 11 years old. It is not clear if the areas covered in the C.D.C. study are representative of the country's population.

Increasing vaccination coverage among children is critical to preventing Covid-19-associated hospitalization and severe outcomes, according to the C.D.C. study.

It is difficult for researchers to examine gaps in protection because the agency has not reported nationwide data on the race or ethnicity of children who have been vaccined.

There are seven states and Washington, D.C. that report race data for vaccine-vaccinated children. The Kaiser Family Foundation found that black children were inoculated at lower rates than white children in most states. Hispanic children were inoculated at a lower rate than white children, but Asian children were inoculated at a higher rate.

Black people are less likely to be vaccined than white people, though the gap has grown smaller over the course of the campaign.

Only a third of children from 5 to 11 have at least one vaccine dose, the lowest rate of any age group. The pace of vaccinations in that age group has slowed.

About 400 children were hospitalized with Covid at the hospitals participating in the study during the period from December to February. Almost all of them were unvaccinated. A fifth of the children had to be admitted to an intensive care unit because they had no underlying medical conditions, according to the report.

Three-quarters of the children who tested positive for the virus were admitted to the hospital for Covid, according to the C.D.C.

The agency said that Omicron appeared to be causing less serious illness in children than the Delta variant, but that Omicron was so contagious and infecting so many children that they were hospitalized at higher rates during the Omicron surge.

Adults are more likely to become seriously ill than children. Older children are inoculated at a lower rate than younger children because they don't yet qualify for vaccinations.