At a children’s hospital, a wave of COVID-19 patients
Those too young for vaccine eligibility face risk in places with substantial coronavirus spread
NEW ORLEANS — Helpless to improve her infant son’s breathing as he was about to be intubated, Catherine Perrilloux looked away and prayed. The boy, known as Junior, was 2 months old and gravely ill with COVID-19.
“I see a bunch of them crowding around the room with the ventilator machine, and then they pull out the tubing, and I’m just losing control,” Perrilloux, a dean at a nearby private school, recalled last week in her son’s room in the pediatric intensive care unit. “You can’t do anything. It’s just paralyzing.”
At Children’s Hospital New Orleans, where the ICU has been jammed with COVID-19 patients, scenes like this have played out unrelentingly over the past month. Nurses raced around monitoring one gut-wrenching case after another.
“We all thought, ‘Well, thankfully it’s not happening to the kids; none of us would be able to stomach that,’ ” said Mark Melancon, a longtime nurse at the hospital, recalling previous stages of the coronavirus pandemic. “Fast forward to now, and it’s happening with the kids.”
As children’s hospitals in many parts of the United States admit more COVID-19 patients, a result of the highly contagious delta variant, health officials are grappling with a sharp new concern: children not yet eligible for vaccination in places with substantial viral spread, now at higher risk of being infected than at any other time in the pandemic. Nowhere is that worry greater than in Louisiana, which has among the highest new daily case rates in the country and only 40 percent of people are fully vaccinated.
The situation at Children’s Hospital grew so intense this month that the state called in a federal “surge team” of emergency responders from the Department of Health and Human Services. The group of about 14 included a physician, a nurse practitioner, nurses, paramedics, a respiratory therapist and a pharmacist.
The team was the first assigned to a children’s hospital during the pandemic.
Dr. Mark W. Kline, the hospital’s physician in chief, said that its overcrowded units threatened care for children across the region. It is one of the few advanced children’s hospitals in Louisiana, he said, and there are few other options for specialized pediatric care.
Medical staff throughout the hospital said the causes of illness in children were often simple: parents, family members and friends who were unvaccinated and not wearing masks.
“I’ve had to make peace with people not doing what they’re supposed to. The kids are suffering,” Melancon said. “Not that I accept it, but if I get hung up in the anger of it, I would walk around confronting people in Walmart, here, everywhere.”