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(CNN) -
An 11-month-old girl with COVID-19 had to be airlifted to a Texas hospital 241 kilometers away from where she was due to a shortage of pediatric beds in the Houston area.
She is now stable and is no longer intubated.
The baby has made an "amazing recovery," said Dr. Dominic Lucia, pediatric emergency physician and medical director of Baylor Scott & White McLane-Temple Children's Medical Center, where the girl was transported Thursday.
"He doesn't need the respirator anymore. Right now he doesn't depend on that anymore (...) and he's actually resting with his mom. He looks great."
Almost 72,000 children and adolescents contracted COVID-19 in the US last week;
it's a "substantial" increase, say pediatricians
The girl tested positive for COVID-19, according to Amanda Callaway, a spokeswoman for the Harris Health System.
Callaway said the girl was having seizures and needed to be intubated, but Lyndon B. Johnson Hospital (LBJ), where she was initially taken, does not offer pediatric services.
And none of the major pediatric hospitals in the area had beds available, Callaway said.
A video posted by Harris Health shows the baby being loaded into an air ambulance for transport to a hospital in Temple Thursday morning.
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"Like us, many of the children's hospitals are at or near full capacity," Lucia told CNN on Friday.
In that situation it is "where we are for many days at the moment. Fortunately, once they approached us, although we are very far away, we were able to help her."
Lucia said doctors were able to remove the baby from life support measures and described her condition as "very stable."
"He is doing very well and on his way back to health," he said.
Last year, the hospital had two or three pediatric COVID-19 cases at any one time, compared to five to seven in the past seven to 10 days, Lucia said.
"With the delta variant we are certainly seeing more infectivity in the population that includes children, which also includes babies," said the doctor.
"And with this particular increase, we are seeing more symptomatic children testing positive," he explained.
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He added: "We are also hospitalizing more and some of them, unfortunately, require critical care services (although) that is not particularly common."
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In the Houston area, Harris Health System has seen a large increase in COVID-19 patients, and at least half of the patients in the Intensive Care Unit have the virus, Callaway said.
"That, combined with normal emergency needs, is overwhelming the system," Callaway told CNN.
Harris Health is part of the Texas Medical Center, the largest in the world, according to its website.
On Thursday, 336 patients with covid-19 were admitted, the highest daily number of admissions since February, according to its latest update.
Florida and Texas account for a third of all US covid-19 cases reported last week, said White House covid-19 response coordinator Jeff Zients.
The cases are mostly in areas where vaccination rates remain low, Zients said in a briefing on Monday.
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The increase occurs at a time when the highly contagious delta variant is spreading.
As White House chief data officer Dr. Cyrus Shahpar tweeted on Friday, the percentage of fully vaccinated Americans reached 50%.
Hospitals are once again filling up with patients as the virus hits the unvaccinated population.
The Harris County / City of Houston Public Health panel reported 220.79 new cases per 100,000 people for seven days on Friday.
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In Texas, the seven-day moving average was 11,042 new daily cases on Monday, according to a CNN analysis of data from Johns Hopkins University.
Gov. Greg Abbott has said he will not impose a statewide mandate for the use of masks and previously prohibited local government entities from requiring vaccination of people.
Texans know "what the standards are, what practices they want to adopt to protect themselves," he told CNN affiliate KPRC last week.
"This is the time for individual responsibility."
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Lucia stressed on Friday the importance of getting vaccinated.
"We are concerned that the schools are ready to start and the fact that the children are going to be together again makes us happy," he said.
"But we certainly hope it is done in a thoughtful way and we support the American Academy of Pediatrics guidelines for children to return to school with masks."
coronavirus Covid-19 Delta variant