| As U.S. adults enjoy the increasing benefits of Covid-19 vaccination, now permitting them to set aside masks in most situations, young children aren't yet able to have the same protection. This has shifted the case load so that now the rate of young kids and early teens catching the virus is higher than among those those 65 and older. And while hospitalizations across all age groups continue to drop, they aren't falling as quickly among the youngest.
The new reality coupled with virus variants that spread more easily has pediatric researchers investigating whether Covid-19 may be becoming more severe for children.
"The big concern is that we've left a whole population of children unprotected," says Adrienne Randolph, a critical-care doctor at Boston Children's Hospital who leads a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention-funded research effort in the area.
Randolph will look at serious Covid-19 cases in kids and a rare, but sometimes deadly, disease linked to the virus called multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children, or MIS-C. Randolph's work began last year and was renewed May 4 to look at whether the virus is taking a bigger toll on children.  It's still true that children aren't likely to die from Covid-19 or MIS-C, but that doesn't mean there aren't serious consequences.
"Some have go to rehab,'' Randolph says, some go home on oxygen." She plans to go back through data over the past few months as she and her team collect new reports — some 50 pages long — from a nationwide network of pediatric health centers. If they find worrisome patterns, they'll "report findings as soon as we can," she says. The good news is that Covid-19 cases are falling in just about every state, and almost 47% of people in the U.S. have received at least one vaccine shot. But that number falls to as low as 25% in some southern states and a couple in the mountainous West, according to the Bloomberg Vaccine Tracker. The concern is that states that trail in vaccinations could see Covid-19 flare-ups in the coming months, particularly now that the more-easily spread B.1.1.7. variant first found in the U.K. is the dominant strain in the U.S. "Last summer, we saw a huge surge in cases in these Southern states, likely tied to people going into air conditioning in the hot summer months," says Megan Ranney, an emergency physician and researcher at Brown University in Rhode Island. "If vaccination rates do not increase, it is likely there will be recurrent surges."—Anna Edney | 
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