A newborn baby has been treated for COVID-19 in the intensive care unit and sent home, Health Minister Adrian Dix said Tuesday (Sept 14).
The news about the baby, who is less than 28 days old, was released in a chart tweeted out by Dix Monday. A child between the ages of 10 and 12 is currently still in ICU with the virus.
When asked why such serious information was provided with no context in a social media post, Dix said that the province is simply seeking to provide a breakdown of how many COVID critical care patients are vaccinated or unvaccinated.
“I’m happy to report that the infant in the ICU has been discharged healthy and that’s good news,” he said at an unrelated news conference about Northern Health care services. “We don’t talk about the cases in general but we provided information about all the age categories and it’s part of what we continue to do, to tell people what the situation is with the seriousness of COVID-19.”
COVID vaccines are currently only approved for ages 12 and older, although there is an expectation they may be available to younger children by the end of the year.
93% of those in ICU due to COVID-19 today in BC were not fully vaccinated.
See full breakdown: pic.twitter.com/VsnCeFdIsA
— Adrian Dix (@adriandix) September 13, 2021
Overall, the breakdown of ICU cases showed that the majority of patients on Monday were unvaccinated. The 10 vaccinated individuals in ICU with the virus were all older than 50; two people in their fifties, five people in their sixties and three people in their seventies.
There were eight partially vaccinated individuals in ICU; one person in their forties, one in their fifties and six in their sixties.
In contrast, there were 121 unvaccinated ICU patients; one baby under 28 days old, one child between the ages of 10 and 12, six people in their twenties, 13 in their thirties, 15 in their fourties, 35 in their fifties, 27 in their sixties, 18 in theirs seventies and five in their eighties.
Speaking of the 10-to-12-year-old child who is being treated for COVID-19 in ICU, Dix said there is a “fairly low barrier to critical care.”
The B.C. Centre for Disease Control releases weekly totals of delayed case, hospitalization, ICU and death information, sorted by age.
The latest statistics, up until Aug. 28, show that there have been fairly few hospitalizations and ICU cases among children.
There have been 9,903 cases in children under the age of 10, along with 104 hospitalizations, of whom eight have been in ICU. Two people in that age group have died due to the virus.
There have been 18,235 cases in children between the ages of 10 and 19, along with 78 hospitalizations, 18 of whom have been in ICU. There have been no virus-related deaths in that age group.
As of Aug 28, there had been 166,262 cases in all age groups in B.C. Of those, 8,691 were hospitalized, 2,012 in ICU and 1,822 died. While nearly half the cases have been in the 20–40 age group, 83 per cent of the deaths have been in people ages 70 and up.
Editor’s note: An earlier version of this story incorrectly noted that the majority of cases in ICU were “fully vaccinated” despite numbers later in the article showing that 121 patients were unvaccinated, eight were partially vaccinated and 10 were fully vaccinated.
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