Covid vaccines for kids are coming soon — some families are counting

Florida parent Judi Hayes said she can’t wait to get her 10-year-old son, Will, back in the classroom. However, she’s holding out until he can get vaccinated.

“He’s sad. He misses his friends and his teachers and special Olympics tennis,” said Hayes, whose child has Down syndrome and has been doing virtual learning since the onset of the pandemic in spring 2020.

Hayes said she opted her son out of in-person learning because his Down syndrome puts him at a greater risk for complications from Covid-19. She and a handful of other parents are currently suing Gov. Ron DeSantis and state education officials over the governor’s ban on mask mandates in schools. Will’s 13-year-old brother is vaccinated and goes to class, albeit masked.

“He doesn’t really understand why his brother gets to go school and he doesn’t,” Hayes said. “That’s where the vaccine comes in. We will get him vaccinated the second it is possible and hopefully he’ll be able to get back to school, maybe in January.”

As the Biden administration begins assembling and shipping doses of Pfizer‘s and BioNTech‘s Covid vaccine for children ages 5 to 11 for immunizations as early as this week, some parents say they are preparing their kids for a return back to “normal” – in-person learning, sports and other extracurricular activities that were largely put on hold due to the pandemic.

Even though the daily number of Covid cases in the U.S. is falling, the virus still infects an average of more than 72,000 Americans per day, according to a CNBC analysis of data from Johns Hopkins University. Children are beginning to make up a greater share of new infections.

Kids ages 5 to 11 made up 10.6% of all reported Covid cases nationwide in the week ending Oct. 10 even though they represent about 8.7% of the U.S. population, according to data compiled by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Although kids are less likely than adults to suffer from severe disease, a small portion of them do. At least 5,217 kids have suffered from multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children, or MIS-C, a rare but serious Covid-related complication.

Fully vaccinating 1 million kids ages 5 to 11 would prevent 58,000 Covid infections, 241 hospitalizations, 77 ICU stays and one death, according to a modeled scenario published by the Food and Drug Administration last week. Up to 106 kids would suffer from vaccine-induced myocarditis but most would recover, according to the agency.

Children are generally infected less severely, but “they can be infected to the point that they suffer and are hospitalized and die,” said Dr. Paul Offit, a pediatrician at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and a…