during the last week of august, a child accounted for one in every five covid cases, according to the american academy of pediatrics. with kids going back to school cross across the kr he. . icu beds are overwhelmed or at capacity in hard hit states. what does that mean? here is how this emergency medicine physician explained it. it means if your child comes to the hospital ill with covid-19 or even a non-covid problem that requires icu level care, any will likely have to wait an indeterminate amount of time for a bed. it means worsened health outcomes and mortality rates. joining me now is dr. black stock, founder of health equity and msnbc contributor. i spoke to somebody in louisiana at a pediatric hospital there, pediatric emergency. and they d actually sent a warning. they said if your child comes here and needs an icu bed they re literally going to have
to wait until another child dies in order to get that. that was a stark example. but if you re a parent who doesn t think your kid is getting covid, you always want to know there is some ability to treat your child, right? at that moment when your child needs a hospital bed, that s not the moment you worry about the capacity of the hospital. exactly. we are in such dire times right now. and the fact is there are relatively few pediatric icus throughout the country. starting out there are not enough icus to meet the demand of the surge we are seeing right now. essentially we are not protecting our children. we have a highly infectious variant out there. and what we re seeing is more children are being infected because we have essentially reopened. children are going back to school. and there is such a variability in terms of public health strategies that are being utilized by schools. that s contributing to the high