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The Delta Variant Is Sending Extra Kids to the Hospital. Are They Sicker, Too?

The Delta Variant Is Sending More Children to the Hospital. Are They Sicker, Too?

What is clear is that a confluence of factors – including Delta’s contagiousness and the fact that people under the age of 12 are not yet eligible for vaccination – will result in more children being hospitalized, especially in areas of the country in where the virus is increasing. “If you have more cases then of course it eventually comes down to the kids,” said Dr. Malley.

Many children’s hospitals had hoped for a quiet summer. Several common childhood viruses are less common in the warmer months, and national Covid rates declined in the spring.

But that started to change last month as Delta spread. “The number of positive Covid tests began to rise in early July,” said Marcy Doderer, president and chief executive officer of Arkansas Children’s Hospital. “And then we really started to see the kids get sick.”

The vaccines are effective against Delta – and offer strong protection from serious illness and death – but children under 12 are not yet eligible for them. As more adults are vaccinated, children make up an increasing proportion of Covid cases; between July 22 and July 29, they accounted for 19 percent of reported new cases, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics.

“They’re the unvaccinated,” said Dr. Yvonne Maldonado, a pediatric infectious disease specialist at Stanford Medicine and chair of the AAP Infectious Diseases Committee. “We see all new infections there.”

According to the association, almost 72,000 new pediatric Covid cases were reported from July 22 to July 29, almost twice as many as in the previous week. At Johns Hopkins All Children’s Hospital, 181 children tested positive for the virus in July, up from just 12 in June.

Most of these children have relatively mild symptoms such as runny nose, constipation, cough, or fever, said Dr. Wassam Rahman, the medical director of the Pediatric Emergency Center at All Children’s. “Most children are not very sick,” he said. “Most of them will go home and receive preventive treatment at home. But as you can imagine, families are scared. “

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Business

On-line playing is sending sports activities betting ETFs to file highs

Online gambling is sending sports betting ETFs to record highs

ETF players will double in online gambling and sports betting arena in 2021.

Betting interest has increased during the coronavirus pandemic, and a week after the Super Bowl LV, related ETFs are on a record run.

There are currently two main funds that offer centralized exposure to gaming and sports betting – the Roundhill Sports Betting & iGaming (BETZ) and the VanEck Vectors Gaming ETF (BJK). Both started last year and have quickly reached record highs.

BETZ in particular has increased by 96% since it was launched in early June.

VanEcks ETF offers a more traditional mix of casino stocks and gambling names – including Wynn Resorts and Las Vegas Sands – that have been hit by travel and leisure issues. BETZ is a worldwide pure game with digital gaming stocks like online bookmaker PointsBet, Canadian betting company Score Media and even a handful of SPACs that focus on sports betting technology and data providers.

Roundhill Sports Betting & iGaming ETF (BETZ) Top Holdings (% Weighting)
Related group 5.2%
PointsBet Holdings 4.8%
Penn National Gaming 4.5%
DraftKings 4.4%
Score Media and Gaming 4.2%

The BETZ fund has grown to more than $ 350 million in total assets under management in just seven months, and has posted inflows of $ 146 million so far this year.

Will Hershey, Co-Founder and CEO of Roundhill Investments, said the industry has been in hyper-growth mode (PASPA) since sports betting was legalized at the federal level in the US in 2018 with the repeal of the 1992 Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act.

Record bets on Super Bowl weekend

It should come as no surprise that Super Bowl Sunday sparked an extra dose of intense betting activity. It’s the biggest betting day of the year for both Las Vegas sports betting and online betting shops – and it’s no different for the world of ETFs.

The numbers have grown from state to state, and the latest totals show that $ 444 million of regulated wagers were placed on the big game, with seven states still to report.

That’s already a total of $ 300 million last year and marks a record high or a bet on a single event. PlayUSA analysts expect the final balance sheet this year to top legal Super Bowl betting over $ 500 million – and that doesn’t include billions more coming in on black markets and unregulated sports books.

U.S. sports betting revenue is projected to reach $ 2.5 billion in 2021 and grow to $ 8 billion by 2025.

What is driving the rapid expansion? Hershey cites the ubiquitous shift from stationary to mobile and online services, as well as a major expansion of legalization across the country.

State legalization

More and more states like Tennessee and Virginia, which placed their first online sports betting in January, are getting online with legal sports betting.

“We expect the US market to mature and more states to go online. That will change and mean income for sports betting operators,” Hershey said on CNBC’s “ETF Edge” last week. “But perhaps more importantly, it will mean tax money for lawmakers.”

Sports betting has been legalized in some form in 21 states, including New Jersey, Nevada and Pennsylvania, and Washington, DC. However, some of the largest states – California, Florida, and Texas – have yet to follow.

Still, Hershey insists we are in the early stages of legalization and expects 10-12 more states to go online this year.

Kick-off for legalization

According to Hershey, it makes perfect sense for states to approve sports betting to fill the budget gap caused by the pandemic and generate additional tax revenue.

“I really think what is going on here, similar to what is going on in the cannabis industry, is that there are significant budget deficits at the state level, even at the state level,” Hershey said. “We’re just getting started. If we look at the opportunity for US markets [alone]We’re talking $ 20 billion to $ 30 billion in terms of the total addressable sports betting market. “

With the rapid rise of players like DraftKings and FanDuel, interest in sports betting has shifted dramatically from daily fantasy sports to live betting – but Hershey believes that most of the real money will continue to flow into online casinos, with sports books mostly the Drive customer acquisition.

A game of blackjack would still offer higher margins and much more predictable revenue than, say, this year’s Super Bowl, where Tom Brady and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers defense stunned sports fans by giving the Kansas City Chiefs a 31-9 blowout loss gifts.

“Who could have seen this coming?” Said Hershey. “You have to do that as sports betting. Live betting technology will be so advanced that we won’t even talk about the next 10 minutes, but rather whether the next field will be a curve or a fastball. I think this will be real monetization opportunities open when the technology gets to that point. “

Some skeptics may oppose the idea of ​​gambling online or buying more pot to balance the national budget, but Dave Nadig, director of research at ETF Trends, said he saw tax history as inevitable.

“Certainly the legalization of cannabis was a big part of it the demand for tax revenue at the state and local level,” he said in the same “ETF Edge” interview. “I think we will honestly see the same thing in anything we have previously regulated as a ‘sin activity’, such as gambling.”

Bottom line: when it comes to hot, lively topics associated with gamification trends, ETF investors are right there.

Disclosure: CNBC’s parent company Comcast and NBC Sports are investors in FanDuel.

Disclaimer of liability

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Business

Pfizer sending fewer Covid vaccine vials to account for additional doses

Pfizer sending fewer Covid vaccine vials to account for extra doses

Dr. Scott Gottlieb, who sits on Pfizer’s board of directors, on Monday defended the company’s move to send fewer vials of its Covid-19 vaccine and count six doses per vial instead of five. This is the best way to ensure the extra dose is used.

When the company started shipping vaccine bottles last month, pharmacists found that they could often extract an extra dose from each vial, which on paper only held five doses. That discovery meant the United States could actually receive more doses of the vaccine than the $ 200 million the Department of Defense bought under its deal with Pfizer.

“The bottom line is that this is a very scarce resource. We have to make sure that every dose is used,” Gottlieb said Monday in CNBC’s “Squawk Box”. “The only way to do this is to market this as a six-dose vial and have the right equipment ready to extract that sixth dose, which is what Pfizer is actually doing.”

The New York Times reported Friday that Pfizer executives in recent weeks have successfully urged Food and Drug Administration officials to revise the wording of the vaccine’s emergency approval to officially include the sixth dose for the federal treaty.

Some pharmacists were confused by the extra doses or didn’t have the correct syringes to extract them and threw them away.

“During this pandemic that is killing many people around the world, it is important that we use all available vaccines and vaccinate as many people as possible. To keep an extra dose in each vial that could be used to vaccinate more people would be one Tragedy, “said company spokeswoman Amy Rose.

Gottlieb said Monday the move will help the US speed up the distribution of vaccine doses, adding that Pfizer can now deliver 120 million doses of the vaccine in the first quarter of 2021, up from 100 million before the labeling change.

However, the move puts pressure on U.S. pharmacists to extract six doses from each vial, which requires some special syringes called low dead space syringes. The US government, which ships kits of syringes and vaccine doses, has signed a contract with syringe manufacturers such as Becton Dickinson, the world’s largest syringe maker, to ensure supplies to local authorities.

However, Becton Dickinson is unable to significantly increase the US supply of syringes, Reuters reported earlier Monday, doubting how many vials the US can extract six doses from.

Gottlieb said the vaccines will only qualify as six-dose vials, which will also give local authorities the correct syringes to extract the final dose.

Gottlieb noted that when Pfizer applied for approval of his emergency vaccine, he knew that six doses could be taken from each vial, but revising the wording of the application would have delayed approval of the vaccine. The company therefore applied for approval with the intention of revising the wording later to reflect the six-dose vials.

He added that it took the U.S. FDA longer than regulators in other countries to make the change. Authorities in the UK, Switzerland and Israel have already revised the wording of their approvals for the Pfizer vaccine to take into account that each vial contains six doses.

Gottlieb, the former head of the FDA, clarified that the change should not be applied retrospectively, which means that all vials previously shipped will be counted as containing five doses.

But “at some point you had to set up the accommodation to properly account for the doses,” said Gottlieb.

Disclosure: Scott Gottlieb is a CNBC employee and a member of the boards of directors of Pfizer, genetic testing startup Tempus, health technology company Aetion Inc., and biotech company Illumina. He is also co-chair of the Healthy Sail Panel of Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings and Royal Caribbean.