Q&A Deluxe afternoon
What is about to end has been a week certainly not stingy with news from the world of video games, also for this reason today's appointment with the Q&A Deluxe promises to be absolutely unmissable.As is the tradition today at 3 pm: 00 the editorial staff will be live to answer your questions and curiosities about the world of video games. The topics to talk about are many, from the news on Monster Hunter Rise to the new PlayStation 5 restock without forgetting the most discussed topic of recent years, the confirmation of the acquisition of Bethesda by Microsoft and the statements of Phil Spencer on the exclusives and on the role of the Game Pass.
We therefore invite you to anticipate your questions using the comment space available at the bottom of this news. And at the end of the live stay tuned because Cydonia will play with the PlayStation 5 version of Crash Bandicoot 4 It's About Time, available from today (also on Xbox Series X / S and Nintendo Switch.
We invite you to join us on the channel Twitch by Everyeye starting at 15:00. The subscription to the channel is free if you are subscribed to Amazon Prime and you can actively support us, among the bonuses for premium members we report direct without advertising interruptions and access to Telegram channels and Discord of the Horde of Everyeye.
Kids, COVID and vaccines: Q&A with Texas Children's pediatrician-in-chief
As adults across the U.S. are vaccinated against COVID-19, many parents have vaccine questions related to kids. To answer them, we turned to Jim Versalovic, the interim pediatrician-in-chief of Texas Children’s Hospital.
Could you start with the big picture? What’s the most important things to know about kids and the COVID vaccines?
First of all, you should know that children certainly can be infected with COVID-19. They definitely are vulnerable. We need to be safe with our children — in our households, in schools and throughout our communities. We need to be vigilant and continue to promote safe behavior with our children.
Yes, it’s true that COVID-19 has a much greater impact on older adults. There’s no question about that in terms of hospitalization and mortality. But children can be infected. They can get sick with COVID. And yes, there are children that have to be hospitalized. We’re taking care of many of these children at Texas Children’s.
Spring break is coming. What recommendations do you have for parents and students?
Let’s start first with college students. We certainly know that older adolescents and young adults can have severe COVID infections. Any young adult who has a chronic underlying medical condition that would put them at greater risk for severe COVID needs to be especially careful in any large gathering. Even if they’re vaccinated, they need to be masking and distancing and doing appropriate hand hygiene. Those who are healthy need to continue to be very careful in large gatherings. It would be wise to continue to mask and distance and use proper hand hygiene.
We don’t know who can have severe COVID. We know that previously healthy adolescents and young adults may require hospitalization due to COVID. It is hard to predict.
With children and older adolescents, parents are going to have to be very emphatic. Older adolescents and young adults are prone to taking risks, and getting out. They want to socialize — it’s been a year now in this pandemic. But the advice for high school and below is the same as for college students: We have to continue safe behavior.
The reality is that there is plenty of COVID still in the community, we still have a hard time predicting which healthy people may get severe COVID, and it’s better to be safe than sorry.
So just because it’s legal now to go into McDonald’s and eat a Happy Meal indoors doesn’t mean it’s a great idea?
Yes. We need to be really careful now. The statewide masking mandate is ending, and children, adolescents and particularly young adults may be ready to take liberties with masking and distancing — like going into a fast food restaurant and eating, which requires taking masks off.
It will be very important for everyone to continue to think about risks and how to reduce them. Ask yourself: Is this eating establishment too crowded? Can I be in a less crowded environment? Can I eat outdoors versus indoors? Can I sit at a table that’s at a distance from the next one?
What do we know so far about how COVID-19 affects kids of different ages — babies, toddlers, and so on up the line?
It’s been more than a year since COVID-19 arrived in the Greater Houston area. So over the past year, we’ve taken care of many children. We’ve tested and diagnosed more than 10,000 cases of COVID-19 in children at Texas Children’s, then following thousands of children who had been infected with COVID-19.
Adolescents are at greater risk of disease from COVID than younger children.
Elementary-school-age children and younger are at lower risk of severe disease. But we do have to keep an eye on again those children with chronic underlying medical conditions.
MORE COVID NEWS: Vaccine rate rising, but still not seeing 'rapid decline' in COVID cases yet
James Versalovic, M.D., Ph.D., the interim pediatrician-in-chief and the pathologist-in-chief at Texas Children's Hospital, poses for a portrait Friday, Feb. 5, 2021, at the hospital in Houston.Jon Shapley/Staff photographerFortunately, very few children are at risk of succumbing or dying of COVID. Children and adolescents who have underlying medical conditions — chronic heart conditions, kidney disease, cancer, obesity, Type 2 diabetes — are at greater risk of moderate to severe COVID and hospitalization. And we know that children can get pneumonia and respiratory distress.
Children who had a very mild infections may, several weeks after other symptoms clear, develop other symptoms that require hospitalization. That is the Multisystem Inflammatory Syndrome in Children, MIS-C. Due to this disease, children may need to be hospitalized weeks after a mild infection. So there are possible complications of COVID affecting the heart and lungs.
There’s also another aspect of COVID: “long-haul COVID” or “long COVID.” We’re learning more about this in children. Generally speaking, adolescents are at greater risk than younger children, and children who are otherwise healthy rate at much lower risk than adults.
But we do have to keep an eye on their symptoms and keep an eye on underlying medical conditions.
Early on, there were concerns that long-haul COVID was affecting the hearts of some college athletes, and maybe younger ones as well. Are researchers and doctors still worried about that?
Yes. Young athletes of middle-school and high-school age may have a cardiac complications due to COVID. Again, this may follow weeks after the first phase of the infection. It may be part of MIS-C, or it may be separate from that.
They may have heart palpitations; they may have other cardiac findings. In our heart center, our cardiologists see these young athletes who were previously very healthy, but have ongoing symptoms — for instance, weeks after having a mild COVID infection, they may get tired from physical activity.
It’s a real problem — one that parents need to follow closely with their young athletes at home, and if necessary, bring them to a pediatrician or a pediatric cardiologist.
Adults are advised to wear double masks now. Should children wear double masks?
Generally, I would say it’s not necessary for healthy young children to have double masking. It’s very difficult for most children to keep a single mask on, let alone worrying about double masking. So I worry that double-masking would be so difficult and cumbersome that children will just not mask, or the second they’re away from parents, they’ll take it off.
There’s good reason for adults or children with underlying medical conditions to consider double masking — particularly now with variants such as the UK variant spreading in Texas. These new variants of COVID may be very highly contagious.
But generally, for children, we would recommend that single masks are sufficient.
Tons of parents want to know what’s going on with vaccines for children. When can we expect them?
We’re trying to keep this vaccine train moving rapidly. As you know, we started vaccinating in December with health care workers in Category 1a at Texas Children’s and other children’s hospitals across the country. In January we began vaccinating older adolescents and younger adults, ages 16 and above, in Category 1b — people with chronic underlying medical medical conditions that put them at high risk for severe COVID and possible hospitalization.
The vaccine safety trials are occurring in a stepwise fashion, working backward in age from older adolescents to the younger adolescents to school-aged children and then to preschool children. We are now keeping a close eye on adolescent trials with both the Pfizer and Madonna vaccines, and more to follow with J&J and others.
For the younger adolescents, those ages 12 and above, we expect the trials to be completed by summertime, then go to the FDA for authorization hopefully by early to mid-summer. That will be very important: Once vaccines are authorized, that means that children ages 12 and above could get vaccines just prior to the beginning of the next school year. And that would include students going off to college.
For younger children, Texas Children’s and other hospitals are planning trials with Pfizer, Moderna and J&J. We expect to begin trials by early summer for children 5 and above, so we will hope to have vaccines available for children 5 and above before the end of the calendar year 2021.
Beyond that will be the children younger than 5. And so the the tough part is that parents will need to wait several months for these vaccines to become available for children. But we are working very actively now with vaccine manufacturers and with the governments to make sure these vaccines are available later this year.
The CDC recently released guidelines saying that people who’ve been vaccinated can begin feeling a little freer — that they can gather in small numbers with other people who’ve been vaccinated, and that they’re safe to visit family members who haven’t been vaccinated. Are there any health concerns for children being visited by a vaccinated person?
This is going to be a tender topic in the weeks and months ahead. We certainly understand the rationale behind the CDC’s latest guidance that vaccinated adults may gather in small numbers with other vaccinated adults. That’s certainly fine. We believe in these vaccines. They are highly safe, highly effective, particularly at preventing a severe disease and a hospitalization.
But people under 16, unless they’re participating in a trial, are not vaccinated. And we know that vaccinated individuals may pass the virus to an unvaccinated individual. It’s safe to say that the risk of transmission from a vaccinated individual to an unvaccinated person is substantially less than from a non-vaccinated person to another unvaccinated person. That said, it’s difficult now to quantify how much the transmission risk is lower.
A vaccinated person still needs to be cautious with the children in their home, and with unvaccinated children. The vaccinated person could still possibly pass that virus along to children. One needs to be vigilant about whether that child develops symptoms.
We can treat most children as outpatients. They do not need to be hospitalized; parents just need to keep a watchful eye. We understand that families are congregating and are gathering in small groups, and we understand the importance of that to the family unit. But we have to continue to be careful about mixing vaccinated with unvaccinated individuals, including inside the household.
For families, the key word here is “yes.” We understand the need to get together, and the CDC is accepting that. But we certainly need to watch carefully for any symptoms consistent with COVID, and to test those individuals right away.
One of our readers asks, are safety protocols different for a baby than for older children? Say, if a family wants to visit vaccinated grandparents, is the advice any different for their baby than for their 5-year-old?
One point I’ll make at the beginning: If Mom was vaccinated during pregnancy — pregnancy is a high-risk category, so vaccination is recommended — if Mom was vaccinated, she passed antibodies to the baby. Babies of vaccinated mothers will likely have sufficient antibodies to protect them, at least during most of that first year of life.
Other infants could possibly be infected, either by someone who is vaccinated or unvaccinated. Generally speaking, infants seem to be less susceptible, but we do have to be careful. We have seen infants infected with COVID-19.
So if there is a gathering, it would be best with infants to continue to practice safe behaviors. Mask and promote distancing and hand washing as much as possible.
Families need to get together. We’re just going to have to tread carefully in the weeks ahead. There aren’t easy answers.
Young children also generally handle COVID-19 well, but we do need to keep a watchful eye on them too — including potential transmission even from vaccinated parents to their children.
A reader has a question about masks. People are re-breathing more of their air than they would would without a mask. Is there any harm in that — either for children or for adults?
It can be an issue if one is undergoing strenuous physical activity. If you’re exercising outdoors and you have plenty of distance, remove the mask.
That said, in an indoor environment, clearly masks are very important in protecting us. So when you’re exercising there, it’s important to take breaks. Walk outside or into an area where no one’s around, and take the mask off.
What else should we be thinking about? What do you want parents to know?
First of all, we talk a lot now about herd immunity. When will we get beyond this pandemic? When can we get back to a more normal lifestyle? It’s been a long year since March 2020.
But for the next several months, especially with our children, it will be important to continue the safe behaviors: the masking and the distancing and the hand hygiene. Adults need to be good role models in promoting those safe behaviors and in thinking about others.
It’s particularly important when we’re out in public. We’re not sure whether the people around us may have an underlying condition or may be unvaccinated. We need to teach our children to be considerate of other human beings.
Second: We are making rapid progress with vaccines and vaccinations. Every week we see progress across the United States, including Texas, with the Pfizer vaccine, the Moderna vaccine, and now the single-shot J&J vaccine.
We need to continue to promote vaccination among all adults, and then later with adolescents and children, once we get through these pediatric vaccine trials.
Finally, while we’re on the topic of vaccines, it’s important to note that many children, particularly young children, are behind on their vaccination schedules now because during this pandemic, it’s been more difficult to see a physician. My other message to parents would be: Work with your pediatrician to make sure your children are getting proper preventive health care, including the various vaccines that are not for COVID.
In the weeks and months to come, we’re going to continue to make great progress with this pandemic. We will get to the other side.
This interview has been edited for length, clarity and continuity.
lisa.gray@chron.com, twitter.com/LisaGray_HouTX