Without mitigation, they predict that 80% of elementary students will be infected within 2 months, with most cases within span of 30 days.

We need to talk about the pediatric bed situation in the USA.

Because things are going to get really bad, real fast, unless people doing things to stop it.

This is an important thread. Please share.

...There are 50 million school-aged children in the US. A little over 4 million children have had confirmed COVID, childstats.gov/americaschildr… downloads.aap.org/AAP/PDF/AAP%20… 16/n 

8 million have been vaccinated. Considering asymptomatic infections, we can guesstimate that approximately 8 million schoolchildren are relatively protected due to past infection.

This means that there are about 34 million susceptible schoolchildren. 17/n 

If current mitigation strategies are ineffective, and 50% of these susceptible schoolchildren catch COVID in the 30 days staring two weeks after school opens (not an unreasonable prediction based on the COVSIM model), what would happen? 18/n 

That means an average of 570,000 children would be infected per day.

If 1% of infected children are hospitalized, pediatric hospitals would need to care for 5700 new COVID admissions daily. 19/n 

But children don’t usually stay just one day. With the original strain in 2020, it was 2.5 days on average, in which case we would need 14,000 general pediatrics beds and 4,300 PICU beds, just for COVID patients...

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