Canada: Rise in admissions of infants with Covid-19 in hospitals

Four major Canadian paediatric hospitals have warned that with “the rise of Omicron, hospitals are starting to see a disturbing, potential new trend – admissions of infants with Covid-19”.

The four hospitals, CHEO in Ottawa, The Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, McMaster Children’s Hospital in Hamilton and Kingston Health Sciences Centre in Kingston, made that statement in a joint release issued on Wednesday.

Since the middle of December, two of the hospitals, CHEO and McMaster admitted six babies under the age of 12 with COVID-19 infections. Prior to that, the statement said, “it was a rare occurrence that an infant was hospitalised for Covid-19 infection”.

At CHEO, it added, vaccination status in these particular cases is being tracked, all the admitted infants’ mothers had not been jabbed against the coronavirus.

The joint statement was also an appeal to expectant women to get vaccinated for the health of their children. The hospitals said they are “encouraging anyone who is pregnant to get vaccinated against Covid-19 for the protection of their baby, as well as themselves”. There are as yet no vaccines available for infants.

“Infants are especially at risk because they have an immature immune system that has difficulty in combating disease. And if the mother has not been vaccinated or infected, they do not have the protection of maternal antibodies transferred during the third trimester of pregnancy,” it noted.

They also said that it had been well studied in other infectious diseases like flu and whooping cough that maternal antibodies resulting from vaccination provided protection for the first six months of a child’s life.

Addressing a concern that may have led to vaccine hesitancy among some pregnant women, they also pointed out that research showed there was “no evidence that Covid-19 vaccination during pregnancy is associated with any adverse pregnancy outcomes”.

“Pregnant individuals are considered a high-risk population for Covid-19 complications, based on higher rates of Covid-19 hospitalisation, ICU admission, and death compared with non-pregnant individuals of the same age,” the statement also said.