One age group is still “resisting” the improvement in the health situation linked to Covid-19 in hospitals: 10-19 year olds.
92 of them are hospitalized on Wednesday, as many as the day before but twelve more than last Friday.
The continuous decline observed for the past two weeks in all other categories is therefore still far from being initiated among adolescents.
17 of these 92 patients are in intensive care.
Again, this number is not decreasing yet and this is an exception.
These figures are of course very low when compared to the nearly 27,000 hospitalized patients in total (6,500 less than the peak reached on November 16), including just under 3,500 in intensive care.
It is also little given that there are 300 pediatric departments in France.
But we can still wonder about the reasons why this does not decrease yet (without excluding the possibility of a simple statistical bug).
A longer delay before hospitalization
Robert Cohen, pediatrician infectious disease specialist at the intercommunal hospital of Créteil, sees three possible reasons.
First of all, children and adolescents are likely to generate pediatric multisystem inflammatory disease (PIMS) if infected with the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus.
If this situation is rare - "13.5 cases per million inhabitants in the population of less than 18 years", indicates Public Health France -, it is established that the symptoms which may then require hospitalization occur late.
"During the first wave of the epidemic, it was estimated that PIMS occurred with an average delay of 4 to 5 weeks after infection," writes Public Health France in its weekly epidemiological bulletin of November 26.
"The majority of symptoms in the event of contamination are completely benign, but there can be this kind of heavier pathologies with a lag of a few weeks", underlines Robert Cohen, who has just been elected president of the National Pediatric Council.
As the new positive cases in 10-19 year olds have been declining since the beginning of November, as in all other age groups, we can assume that the number of young hospitalized patients will end up decreasing in the coming days.
While emphasizing that "children are very poorly represented among patients hospitalized for Covid-19 and among deaths", the health agency indicates that a "new assessment of pediatric multi-system inflammatory syndromes will be presented soon".
Little confined teenagers
Nevertheless, we observe that the peak of positive cases in adolescents was reached a few days later than for the other categories.
And this is where the second possible explanation comes in: as colleges and high schools (in part) remained open during the second lockdown that began on October 30, adolescents were among the populations least affected by these restrictions. .
"Obviously, this generated a significant mixing and adolescents are an age group where the virus has circulated well," says Robert Cohen.
Therefore, it is not necessarily surprising that hospitals are slow to "empty" of these young patients.
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Moreover, even if we do not have the daily number of hospital admissions by age group, it can be deduced from the balance of occupied beds, deaths (only five among 10-19 years since the start of the pandemic) and daily home visits.
On this indicator too, the curve is still struggling to go down for adolescents, stagnating around 10 hospitalizations each day.
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The pediatrician finally puts forward a last element, unquantifiable at this stage.
Today, many young people come to the hospital for other care, in particular psychological difficulties which are more and more frequent.
“They are all tested, and those who come out positive can be categorized as having Covid-19,” he says.
This could, at the margin, also vary the curve of the number of adolescents hospitalized after a coronavirus infection.