Omicron: ‘There’s been a lack of concern’ for younger children with COVID-19, doctor says

Family Medicine Physician Dr. Marie-Elizabeth Ramas joins Yahoo Finance Live to discuss the impact the Omicron variant may be having on younger children, COVID case counts occurring in schools, and precautions to take now to ensure an eventual return to normalcy.

Video Transcript

AKIKO FUJITA: The US reported more than one million new COVID cases on Monday, setting a single-day record since the pandemic began. The president is expected to address that grim milestone later this afternoon. But all of this comes as there are increasing concerns about the impact the virus is having on its youngest victims.

At least nine states now reporting new highs in hospitalization among children. Let's bring in Dr. Marie-Elizabeth Ramas. She's family medicine physician in New Hampshire. Doctor, it's good to talk to you today. Give me a sense of what you're seeing in hospitals there on the ground, especially among the youngest victims who are not eligible for vaccines right now.

MARIE-ELIZABETH RAMAS: Thanks for having me, Akiko. Definitely we're seeing a lot more pediatric cases, and, unfortunately, pediatric cases that are in ICU and hospitalized here in New Hampshire, just outside of Boston. We are also meeting our record highs here.

And unfortunately, over the last two years, there's been a lack of, I think, concern for our younger patients as a result of COVID and the level of severity. But just as we would expect, as we're having higher cases with COVID, of course we're having more cases of severe outcomes as a result of COVID. A lot of those cases that are in the hospital, Akiko, are also of children who have family members who are unvaccinated or, of course, who are unable to be vaccinated themselves.

ZACK GUZMAN: Yeah, doctor, it's kind of a strange flip of what we saw play out at the beginning, when, really, it was, let's protect the elderly population. And of course, there were concerns about kids going to school and whether or not they could bring it back into the house. Now, you kind of have a flip side scenario where you have maybe adults who are vaccinated, worried about what they could do for their kids.

And I wonder how much of that might be a bigger problem when you consider kind of now the reports about Omicron being more mild, maybe people letting their guard down a little bit. What should we be correcting about the story when we use the term, mild, to respond or maybe talk about the latest wave?

MARIE-ELIZABETH RAMAS: Lots of great information there. So of course, in the beginning of the COVID pandemic, there was particular concern for one end of the spectrum as far as higher likelihood of getting ill, which is our elderly patients. But as a family physician, I have to think about all of my patients, young and old. And of course, kids were not in school, they were not as exposed.

And if they were in school at the time of the beginning of the crisis, they were wearing masks and we were using mitigating factors. And so, of course, now that we are-- for one reason or another we're tired as a society. It's been two long years. We're definitely reducing our guard.

It's unfortunate, because we've had children who have now lost continuity of their education, of their social emotional development, things that are important for them right now for the last two years. And it's only going to get worse unless we're able to get these kids vaccinated and get the people that take care of them vaccinated, of course.

The reality is is that we're going to be dealing with this for the next couple of years, Omicron and all of the Greek letters that come with it. And so the things that we work for the health and wellness of our community, of our children is getting them vaccinated. And if they can't get vaccinated, those who are taking care of them to be vaccinated on their behalf to protect them.

AKIKO FUJITA: And, doctor, you were mentioning in the commercial break that in New Hampshire where you are, hospitals are at capacity. How are you coping with this new surge, with these new patients coming in through the door if your hospitals aren't able to address every one of those cases?

MARIE-ELIZABETH RAMAS: It's bad over here. New Hampshire is, unfortunately, a little bit behind as a result to vaccination rates. And we're starting to see the effects of that, particularly after the holiday. We have patients, Akiko, who are waiting in hallways of the emergency room, some on ventilators.

We have doctors and nurses that have to make decisions on who is going to get lifesaving protocol treatments and not. And, unfortunately, we have to divert patients. We have to transfer them down to either Boston or up North to Dartmouth-Hitchcock hospitals just because we are at sheer capacity. It's only going to get worse.

We were hoping that this was going to wait until February at least. But again, my colleagues are tired. But we're still doing it day in and day out. What we asked is that now we see public health has become very personal. And we need to do all we can as individuals to make sure that we stay as healthy and as well as possible.

ZACK GUZMAN: Let's talk about, all we can, because all we can has been stretched-- I think a lot of people fatigued with kind of measures that were put in place. But still, I mean, we just showed the chart again-- it's kind of crazy to think about when we were so focused earlier on cases, and just cases, maybe different when we shift now to focusing in on hospitalization rates.

But still, there are people wondering if now would be a good time to maybe shut schools down, some communities even doing so on their own saying, look, you know, we don't want to take our chances here. What would be the advice there kind of given, again, the thread-- or the needle that people are trying to thread here when it comes to still having people go back to work and, again, avoid the mental stress of some of the things we dealt with earlier?

MARIE-ELIZABETH RAMAS: Yeah, you're definitely right. We need to weigh the risks and benefits. And what we've seen in countries that have done a good job in mitigating the spread of COVID-19 and also maintaining some semblance of normalcy within their structure is that, particularly for our schools, as you mentioned, making sure that we're wearing masks, and using proper hygiene, maintaining physical distancing when appropriate is definitely better, we know, than not going to school at all.

The other aspect that we have to think about is not all schools are prepared to go virtual. We have several school districts here in the state of New Hampshire at least that did not really have a virtual fallback plan if we needed it. And so we have to think about the best options for our kids right now and for our families is to try to keep as much social contact as we can, because we know that's important.

And the way that we do that is by, again, wearing masks, washing our hands, maintaining physical distancing, and getting vaccinated. I wish it was more complicated than that. But what I've seen is that when we're able to use these mitigating factors, we know that infection rates are less.

We know that the outcomes are more mild, meaning that we are not getting as many hospitalizations and long-term effects. And we know that people are healthy and more well in general.