The number of very sick children admitted to Children’s Hospital New Orleans with Covid-19 has exploded over the past two weeks — from zero to 20.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” said Dr. Mark Kline, the hospital’s physician-in-chief. “We are seeing children fall ill that we just simply didn’t see in the first year of the pandemic, before the delta variant came along.”…

Children have been susceptible to Covid-19 all along. More than 4.1 million children have been diagnosed with Covid-19 since the beginning of the pandemic, accounting for 14.3 percent of all cases, according to the latest data from the American Academy of Pediatrics.

From July 15 to July 29, that percentage rose to 19 percent of weekly reported cases.

“Over the course of the first year of this pandemic, the myth existed that children never got very ill from Covid,” Kline said. That was mainly because the number of pediatric cases was relatively low.