The Delta Variant Is Making Covid a Pandemic of the Young

It has been said countless times by public health figures and politicians, and by magazines like this one, that Covid-19 is now a pandemic of the unvaccinated. The line is easy to write, because it’s true. Breakthrough infections among the vaccinated are an issue, the virus lapping at the edges of our collective immunity. But severe illness and death is almost entirely concentrated among those who haven’t yet gotten the shot.

But who are those unvaccinated people? Increasingly, they are the young. The largest group is little kids, those under 12, because no vaccine has been authorized for them. But the picture doesn’t get much better in older children. Only a third of kids aged 12 to 15 in the US are fully vaccinated, according to figures gathered by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the figure remains below average for people in their late teens and twenties. So it’s little surprise that 22 percent of the US cases reported in the third week of August, 180,000 in all, were diagnosed in children, up from a 14 percent share overall since the pandemic began. That weekly number is double what it was at the beginning of the month, and that’s putting strain on pediatric units across the US, especially in places where the highly transmissible Delta variant is raging.

“When people started dropping their masks and socializing again, that’s when we saw our spike,” says Abdallah Dalabih, a critical care physician at Arkansas Children’s Hospital, where Covid-19 admissions to the state’s only pediatric ICU surged in early August and have remained stubbornly high.