Pediatric Urgent Care

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s admonition that the southern portion of the United States could see a surge of respiratory syncytial virus cases this summer is coming to fruition as we speak—although the scope of the problem appears to be much broader than the CDC anticipated. While the southeast is leading the way in terms of number of cases, RSV (usually higher in the winter) is more prevalent than would be expected for …

One condition of children attending summer camps across the country is often that they wear masks to inhibit possible spread of the COVID-19 virus. Some school districts have already said they plan to do the same when the next academic year begins. At the same time, some parents claim that forcing their kids to wear masks is not only excessive compared with the actual risk to children, but that such a practice actually puts them …

Approval under the current Emergency Use Authorization for children ages 12 years and older to receive a COVID-19 vaccine was heralded as an important step forward in taming the pandemic. Some experts are now questioning the wisdom of doing so, however. An editorial in the British Medical Journal goes as far as to state that vaccinating children is  “hard to justify right now for most children in most countries,” based mainly on the belief that …

Just weeks after the Food and Drug Administration extended the Emergency Use Authorization on COVID-19 immunization to include children ages 12 and up, rapidly accumulating data that should drive parents to get their kids vaccinated is just not having that effect. While the number of adults hospitalized with COVID-19 and its complications is still higher than it is for younger people, the rate of hospitalizations for adults has plateaued while it’s slowly increasing for adolescents—likely …

School nurses have their hands full on a good day, but the COVID-19 pandemic has added layers of responsibility for temperature taking, educating the educators on protocols for the virus, figuring out which children could have been exposed to which family whose father was just diagnosed with the virus…. Even with many states announcing plans to return to “normal” in the fall, it’s likely that precautions (and certainly concerns) will continue for the foreseeable future. …

Recently, we told you about an Associated Press article reporting that while “suspicious” child deaths have risen since the COVID-19 pandemic began, reports of suspected child abuse dropped. The presumption was that professionals with a duty to report, such as teachers, coaches, and clergy, simply were not seeing children up close and therefore were not privy to signs of abuse. Now an article published by JAMA Network confirms that reports went down at the outset …

The past few weeks have seen a jump in the number of Americans who are able to receive the COVID-19 vaccine. While it’s still up to individual states to determine who is eligible, from a regulatory approval standpoint that population should soon include anyone 12 years of age and up thanks to an Emergency Use Authorization granted to the Pfizer–BioNTech vaccine. All that’s left is for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to give …

In many parts of the country, it’s been more than a year since the majority of children attended school on site, full time. Now that roughly half the adult population has gotten at least one dose of COVID-19 vaccine and children as young as 16 are eligible (with that threshold expected to be lowered in the near future), many districts are inviting more kids back in. Not all parents are as comfortable with this prospect …