Fewer infants, children and teenagers visited emergency rooms in 2020 as hospitals discouraged non-COVID cases, according to federal data released Tuesday.
The overall rate of emergency department visits among children aged 0-17 decreased from 48 trips per 100 children in 2019 to 31 per 100 kids in 2020, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported. Rates dropped for both sexes and all races, and wait times also grew shorter, the agency found.
The drop is significant since children’s visit rates were unchanged from 2016 to 2018 and adult visit rates were steady from 2016 to 2020, said CDC statistician Christopher Cairns, an author of the report.
“The most significant finding from this report is that the rate of visits among children aged 0-17 decreased from 2019 to 2020 while there was no change in the visit rate among adults during that time,” Mr. Cairns told The Washington Times.
Visits fell fastest among infants up to one year old in 2020, hitting nearly one-half of the 2019 rate, the report found.
“Even though our data can detect changes in visits to the emergency department, it does not have information to tell whether COVID-19 restrictions or any other reasons are responsible for the drop in visits among children,” Mr. Cairns added in an email.
Parental fears of catching the virus at hospitals and a drop in child play injuries due to the isolation of pandemic lockdowns likely drove the decline, some leading pediatricians told The Washington Times.
“Additionally, I think a lot of people were seeing the reports on the news of overwhelmed hospitals,” said Dr. Christopher A. Rees, a pediatrician and researcher at Emory University School of Medicine. “I recall many families who did seek care in the emergency department during the lockdown periods expressing their hesitance about coming for fear of getting COVID-19.”
Infant fevers likely happened less often since babies rarely left home after the first pandemic lockdowns in March 2020, Dr. Rees added in an email. But he said chronic conditions, including type 1 diabetes, were more severe among those children who came to the ER.
According to health experts, it’s unlikely that children received care elsewhere since most outpatient clinics stopped taking in-patient visits and moved to virtual care during the first year of the pandemic.
Many parents used the ER before COVID-19 because they did not have a family doctor, noted Katy Talento, a former top health adviser at the White House Domestic Policy Council under President Donald Trump.
“A lot of emergency visits by patients of all ages are actually non-emergency situations for patients who don’t have a medical home such as a pediatrician’s office or a primary care doctor,” Ms. Talento said in an email. “As such, hospitals were seen during COVID as hot zones, rather than the convenient, safe access point to care that it used to be.”
Other studies have shown that ER visits from children grew more intense early in the pandemic and involved a greater share of mental health disorders like anxiety, depression and suicide attempts.
That likely occurred because parents waited longer before taking kids to get help, some pediatricians said.
“We found that [pediatric emergency department] visits decreased in number but were generally higher in acuity,” Dr. Leticia Ryan, director of pediatric emergency medicine at Johns Hopkins Children’s Center, said in an email. “We suspect that the threshold for seeking care was higher due to concerns about [COVID-19] exposure.”
Children’s visits plunged right after the declaration of a national emergency in March 2020 sparked “tremendous uncertainty” about the safety of visiting hospitals, added Dr. John V. Campo, a pediatric psychiatrist at Johns Hopkins Children’s Center.
“While it is true that the number of ED visits overall decreased during the pandemic, including the number of ED visits related to mental health, the proportion of patients presenting to the ED with mental health concerns increased and the severity of the illnesses associated with ED presentation was greater,” Dr. Campo said.
For more information, visit The Washington Times COVID-19 resource page.
• Sean Salai can be reached at ssalai@washingtontimes.com.
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