The children had gone to the hospital for various reasons: One had jaundice, another malaria. A third had a broken bone. But once they were admitted, they all tested positive for the coronavirus, a worrying trend in South African hospitals that hints at how transmissible the new variant, omicron, may be.

The doctors in the children’s wards of two large hospitals in Johannesburg say they have not seen a spike in admissions, and they still do not know whether the children have omicron. But the increase in the number of those who test positive after coming in may provide a glimpse into the behaviour of the heavily mutated variant that was discovered just last month, and about which little is known.

“Our suspicion is that Covid positivity rates in the community setting are very, very high at the moment and increasing,” said Dr Gary Reubenson, a pediatrician at the Rahima Moosa Mother and Child Hospital in Johannesburg.

Young children under 12 are not yet eligible for Covid-19 vaccines in South Africa, which also leaves them more vulnerable. While it is still too soon to draw any conclusions about the severity of the illness caused by omicron, early modelling and analysis suggest that it may move twice as fast as the Delta variant.

“What is scary now is the proportion of patients who are positive among those who are admitted is very high,” said Dr Sithembiso Velaphi, who works at the Chris Hani Baragwanath Hospital in Soweto. “The number of admissions overall has not increased.”

And although the number of young patients is relatively small, doctors noted that few of the children so far have needed oxygen.

The number of coronavirus cases in South Africa continues to rise exponentially in a fourth wave of infections that epidemiologists believe is driven by omicron. Since the variant was first sequenced and announced by South African doctors on November 25, it has become the dominant version among samples tested in the country.

At the Rahima Moosa hospital, a public hospital that serves working-class areas in Johannesburg, Dr Reubenson said that he had not seen a spike in admissions but that a higher proportion of paediatric patients and pregnant women were testing positive.

But, he cautioned, it is still too early to draw conclusions about the variant. On Tuesday, there were 10 patients in the paediatric Covid-19 ward, but very few showed respiratory symptoms. Only one child, who was diagnosed with pneumonia, needed oxygen, said Dr Reubenson, who also works as a paediatric infectious diseases specialist.

(New York Times News Service)