Health care providers around the U.S. are noticing a concerning trend: fewer orders for childhood vaccines.
That's because fewer parents have taken their kids in for wellness checks during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Dr. Jalayne Lapke, professor of clinical pediatrics at the University of Illinois College of Medicine Peoria, said that’s no exception locally.
“When the shelter-in-place [order] went into effect in mid-March, there was a marked decrease in vaccines given to children,” Lapke said. “That corresponded with a marked decrease in children going into their primary care providers. Everybody all of the sudden kind of stayed at home, avoided medical facilities, etc. due to the unknowns of COVID-19.”
Lapke said in the beginning, health care providers were canceling or postponing appointments while they awaited further direction from officials. That, coupled with people’s reticence to go to a doctor’s office with potentially ill patients, meant kids started falling behind on their wellness checks.
But Lapke said postponing necessary visits can be just as dangerous as the novel coronavirus itself— especially for children under the age of two.
“These families who think they’re going to wait until it’s ‘safe’ are really doing a disservice to their children,” she said. “They are at great risk early on.”
Lapke said there are a plethora of other diseases that are vaccine-preventable — measles, chickenpox, whooping cough, tetanus, influenza, meningitis, etc. She said it’s important to get those vaccines early and often, as infants have fragile immune systems.
“We may not right at this moment be able to prevent COVID-19, but we sure as heck can prevent the other ones,” she said. “Doing those on time starting at two months is really, I think, of critical importance for the health and safety of all of our children.”
Plus, Lapke said, there are a number of other developmental and growth measures to assess in young children.
“Does your child hear? Can they see? You would think that would be easy to tell — I can tell you that it’s not,” she said. “Then there are things like screening for anemia, screening for lead toxicity … those are things that are extremely difficult to tell without blood tests.”
Lapke said that also includes checks on the parent for things like postpartum depression and excess stress related to the pandemic.
She said health care providers are doing all that they can to ensure those check-ups can still happen safely.
“I think most medical practices separating those visits that are ‘well visits’ from those that are ‘ill visits’ — ‘well’ meaning anything that doesn’t appear to be infectious,” she said. “That could be a school check-up, that could be an ADHD regular visit, a mental health visit for depression or anxiety, a sprained ankle.”
“Ill visits” are separated by time of day and by room, she said. Health care providers are also doing extra cleaning and limiting the number of people brought to appointments.
“As we learn more and more about the asymptomatic COVID positive people, we realize that may or may not be enough. It is still very important to get … their vaccines to prevent anything that would make a bigger deal later on.”
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