Our guest is Dr. Bryan Sibley, a well-known pediatrician in Lafayette who has dedicated his professional life to taking care of our youngest.

We asked Bryan to join us to discuss how the Delta variant of COVID has evolved to affect children in ways that the initial wave of coronavirus never did.

It's been a tough year and a half for all of us, including pediatricians. In the initial stages of the coronavirus pandemic, children were socially distancing, not in school and playing on their school playgrounds, no longer participating in organized sports and activities. They were staying home and playing in the backyard. For the first time in years, they weren't getting sick, breaking bones, coming down with viruses. Entire days would go by with no children being admitted to the hospital or going in with their parents to see their pediatrician.

Dr. Sibley shared that 90% of children's illnesses are caused by respiratory viruses, mostly colds. We typically think that when our little ones get the sniffles it is an allergy, but last spring when all the kids were outside playing and keeping a social distance from others, they didn't get sick!

"We usually think it's allergies when kids get the sniffles, but last spring (2020) they were all outside playing and they didn't get sick! We would go two to three days with no kids being admitted to emergency rooms, no admissions for broken arms or twisted. Children were healthy. It was awesome for public health, terrible for pediatricians!

Then in April 2021, schools and daycares were reopened, the COVID vaccines rolled out, and in May, June, and July, a wave of sick children began showing up, much sicker than pediatricians across the U. S. had ever seen. While virtually no children got COVID in 2020, by the second week of July 2021, children started getting really sick with COVID, presenting with coughs and runny noses.

The 12 to 18 year old group seem to have been hit the hardest, and almost everyone that Dr. Sibley tests in that age group have been positive for COVID. Most are not sick enough to be hospitalized but they have to quarantine and they suffer. Infants and children up to age ten or eleven have not been hit as hard with COVID at this point in time.

Previously only a handful of children had been hospitalized, but in the past few weeks, 50 to 60 children per day have been admitted to pediatric hospitals. While there have been a few deaths, most children do get better and get to go home. The Delta variant of COVID has changed all of the expectations as to who will get sick.

"This is no longer a benign process for children. The COVID vaccine is not yet available to children under twelve years of age. Testing is ongoing and we anticipate vaccine approval for children sometime this school year. The reality is this Delta variant is more contagious and more severe. Children are dying. Hospitals are at a breaking point with staff, personnel, bed space.

The mask mandate has been controversial and Dr. Sibley harkened back to the last major pandemic experienced worldwide: "Last time we had a pandemic, the Spanish Flu in 1918, people got past the crisis by wearing masks. They figured it out. Germs weren't shared and people moved on. They got better." He believes it is important for the health and safety of our children and school administrators that everyone remain masked since the children can't be vaccinated yet.

The COVID mask mandate has seemingly been of great help to the outbreak of flu. In a typical flu season, there are millions of cases of flu and thousands of people die. In the 2020-21 flu season, there were less than 5,000 cases in the U. S., an unheard-of occurrence.