Why COVID-19 hospitalizations of Canadian kids — and infants — could keep rising as Omicron spreads

Kids and teens — and even newborns — are now among the rising number of Canadians being hospitalized with COVID-19 as Omicron infections keep surging across the country to unprecedented levels.

Multiple hospitals recently began seeing an uptick in young patients infected with the coronavirus, CBC News has learned, including some of the country's largest pediatric facilities in British Columbia, Ontario, and Quebec. 

And on Wednesday, several Ontario hospitals issued a public service announcement stating that between two pediatric sites in Ottawa and Hamilton, six infants had been hospitalized for COVID-19 infections since mid-December, despite the previous rarity of infant admissions. 

To be clear, medical experts still stress that COVID-19 remains a mild illness for the vast majority of children; the rise in hospitalizations among youth is likely tied, at least in part, to this variant's uncanny ability to simply infect more people.

However, some physicians are also seeing early signals that Omicron's infection pattern — often impacting the airways more than the lungs — may hit some kids harder than adults.

"The biggest difference is that Omicron is much more respiratory, so kids are presenting with cold-like symptoms, where before it was fever and maybe some gastrointestinal in the earlier waves," pediatric infectious diseases specialist Dr. Fatima Kakkar, of Montreal's Sainte-Justine Hospital, told CBC News.

"Now we're seeing kids, for example, with asthma. Their asthma is getting worse and bringing them into hospital."

Kakkar's hospital, the largest mother-and-child healthcare centre in Canada, reopened its pediatric COVID-19 ward a few weeks back. The team is now seeing admissions on a daily basis, with double the number of patients as the same time last year, she said. 

"We're way higher than we were previously. Part of that is because there are so many cases in the community that kids are coming in — some with COVID, some for other reasons — and we're screening COVID on admission," Kakkar explained.

"In previous waves, babies were essentially unaffected by COVID," she continued. "But now we're seeing newborns. So in that first 30 days of life, significant disease."

The trend of Omicron targeting the airways of both adults and children is evident both in the real world and in laboratory studies, noted Dr. Syra Madad, senior director of special pathogens for the New York City Health System.

"This is where you're seeing more nasal congestion, sore throat — those types of classic influenza-like illness signs and symptoms — than the lower respiratory symptom," she said. 

For many healthy, vaccinated adults, a virus that doesn't ravage the lungs often means a less severe course of illness than during previous waves of this pandemic. But Madad stressed it's a different story for kids.

WATCH | Physician explains why some kids might be 'harder hit' by Omicron infections: