Dr. Fauci on booster shots and delta's threat to children - PBS NewsHour

Dr. Anthony Fauci:

I think it's both. And there are things about the Delta variant that are concerning.

So, when you had a high degree of capability of transmission, you had a certain number of people who would get infected, a certain percentage of children would get infected. And you remember back then, a long time ago, seemingly, they would say, oh, children generally don't get infected as much and they don't transmit as much.

We were dealing with a different virus then. Now you have a virus that does a big and better job of infecting anybody much more efficiently than the previous virus, including children. So, relatively speaking, you are seeing more children getting infected.

And just on numbers alone, when more children will get infected, a proportion of them, a small proportion, albeit, are going to wind up with serious disease, getting hospitalized. And that's one of the reason why, maybe the overwhelming reason, why you're seeing children in this particular context of Delta being in the hospital.

One other point, because you want to make sure that people understand everything and we're transparent. When you look at the severity of disease with Delta, and you put children aside and look mostly at adults, there are some studies that indicate that the chance of hospitalization with Delta, at least in adults, is greater than it was with Alpha.

So there may be a difference in severity. We don't have that nailed down yet. The thing that's nailed down is that, clearly, it's better in transmitting. So, you can make an assumption that it could be that the disease might be even more serious in kids, even though we haven't definitely proven that.

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Dr. Fauci on booster shots and delta's threat to children - PBS NewsHour
Health - Latest - Google News
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