“There is no good reason not to do it in kids,” said Sean O’Leary, a Colorado pediatrician who sits on the American Academy of Pediatrics’ committee on infectious diseases. “It’s a matter of people not being comfortable with doing it.”
Dr. Maya Haasz, an assistant professor at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, said that for the past few years, every child over age 10 who comes to the emergency room at Children’s Hospital Colorado, where she is an attending physician, is screened for suicide risk, using a questionnaire. “Somewhere between 5 and 10 percent of our patients presenting for nonmental health concerns screen positive,” she said — and this was true before the pandemic.
Dr. Maya Haasz, an attending physician in the pediatric emergency room at Children’s Hospital Colorado and an assistant professor at University of Colorado School of Medicine, brought up the vulnerability of children who already had mental health concerns, especially depression and anxiety, and emphasized the need for parents to ask children about their moods, mental health and low moments.
Dr. Maya Haasz, an attending physician in the pediatric emergency room at Children’s Hospital Colorado and an assistant professor at University of Colorado School of Medicine, said they are seeing injuries that reflect a summer of individual activity rather than team sports. Kids are out riding their bikes and their scooters, she said, but not always wearing helmets. “We’re seeing more significant head injuries,” she said.
There’s even a name for it: overtraining syndrome. According to Dr. Gregory Walker, a pediatric primary care sports medicine physician at Children’s Hospital Colorado, “That’s when an athlete has worse performance despite intense training. This can encompass a bunch of factors like physiologic stress, emotional stress, fatigue and anxiety.”
People are wary about close contact with others, so the pandemic is a real threat to bystander CPR, Dr. Sarah Perman of the University of Colorado School of Medicine in Aurora told Reuters. Writing in the journal Circulation, she notes that the American Heart Association recommends hands-only CPR and precautions such as covering faces to reduce the spread of respiratory droplets that may carry the coronavirus.
Given budget crunches and coronavirus testing problems, should universities spend hundreds of thousands of dollars over the course of a season to routinely test players, coaches and staff? “Is this a good use of our resources?” said Dawn Comstock, a sports epidemiologist at the Colorado School of Public Health.
Dr. Sean O’Leary, a pediatrics infectious disease specialist at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, helped write the academy’s guidelines. He is a father of two children, 12 and 16, and a survivor of Covid-19 who is still experiencing some symptoms after he and his wife contracted the coronavirus in March.
