Nearly 100K Children in US Test Positive in 2 Weeks

Since the coronavirus pandemic began, at least 338,982 children have been infected with COVID-19 in the US—and more than a quarter of those infections happened during a period of just two weeks, the New York Times reports. A new report from the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Children's Hospital Association reveals that at least 97,000 US kids tested positive for the virus during the last two weeks of July. The actual numbers could be higher, because the report did not include complete data from Texas and New York.

Another new report, this one from the CDC, reveals when looking at cases of Multisystem Inflammatory Syndrome in Children or MIS-C, the condition related to COVID-19 that affects some kids, about 40% of cases were found in Hispanic or Latino children while 33% were found in Black children. Just 13% of the cases were found in white children. Nearly two-thirds of the 570 MIS-C cases reported from early March through late July ended up in ICUs; 10 of the cases ended in death. The Wall Street Journal reports that, as schools wrestle with whether to resume in-person classes in the fall, more information is coming out to suggest children are not as unaffected by the virus as initial reports suggested. In the US, 45 children under the age of 15 have died from COVID-19. More than 25 kids died from the virus in July alone, CBS News reports. (More coronavirus stories.)