There has been a huge spike in the number of teenagers testing positive for Covid-19 in the past week, but their rate of admission to hospitals and of severe illness is still unknown.
More than 6,400 teenagers in the cohort 15 to 19 years old tested positive for Covid-19 last week, the biggest increase in the group since SA recorded its first infection in March last year.
According to the National Institute for Communicable Diseases (NICD) the spike has been linked to transmission in the community before the reopening of schools, as well as increased testing from schools when they reopened in July.
Most of the infections came from the Eastern Cape while Limpopo showed a spike in the group aged five to nine.
The NICD also said the spike in infections in teenagers could be driven in part by the immunity gap in this age group as adults were more affected than children in the first two waves.
According to the NICD, an increase in weekly incidence of new cases among individuals aged 20 years has been reported by different provinces since week 27 of 2021, but with different start weeks in some provinces. “The increase... could be explained by clusters reported from schools, following reopening of schools in week 30 and 31 of 2021 – private and public schools respectively – as well as transmission in the community as this increase preceded school opening in some provinces,” read the report.
The NICD’s acting executive director, Prof Adrian Puren, told Sowetan on Monday they need to further investigate the reasons for this observation.
“We do not know if this higher incidence translates into larger numbers of hospitalisations and/or severe disease in children. Vaccination, at this time, is not a consideration given that we do not know if the increase in infections means more severe disease/hospitalisation. Children are not thought to be major contributors to transmission. More pertinently, we need to focus on the older age categories to be vaccinated to prevent severe disease and hospitalisations,” he said.
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