Good morning. In this pandemic, sometimes numbers can lose their power. But as kids' Covid cases pass 1.15 million in just one week, words can fail you, too.

Children’s Covid cases top 1 million in one week

More than 1.15 million children were diagnosed with Covid-19 in one week, the American Academy of Pediatrics reports. The latest figures are likely lower than the real number of cases for the week ending Jan. 20, AAP said, based on how states share their data. The number still represents a jump of 17% on top of the 981,000 cases counted for the week ending Jan. 13, and it's double the cases from the week ending Jan. 6. So far, more than 10.6 million children have tested positive for Covid-19 during the pandemic’s first two years. Consider this: More than 2 million of these children have been diagnosed in the past two weeks. “These numbers are staggering,” Moira Szilagyi, AAP president, said in a statement urging people to wear masks in public, isolate when sick, and get vaccinated.

Omicron pushed hospitalizations to a new high

As variants go, Omicron has been “mild,” if mild means not as virulent as Delta, the previous Covid-19 variant of concern. But even when “mild” is defined as not necessarily so severe as to require hospitalization, emergency departments and hospital wards still got slammed with the pandemic's highest hospitalization numbers when this form of Covid emerged in the U.S., a new CDC report says. Health care systems were strained even though hospital stays were shorter, ICU admissions were lower, and deaths were fewer than during previous peaks. The researchers attribute the lower severity in part to vaccination rates, which were higher than when Delta arose. They also say, “this underscores the importance of national emergency preparedness, specifically, hospital surge capacity and the ability to adequately staff local health care systems.”

Behavioral health care for kids is hard to find

The need to provide mental health care to children and adolescents has been surging along with the pandemic, but a survey of primary care practices conducted before the first Covid case was detected documents an already glaring need. More than 85% of 1,401 group practices caring for children said they had trouble finding medication advice, psychotherapy, and family therapy. That’s up from the 67% recorded in a 2004-2005 survey of adult and pediatric practices, the researchers note in their paper out yesterday in the Annals of Family Medicine. Rates of childhood anxiety, depression, self-injury, and suicide had already been climbing, so Covid has no doubt deepened the need, the authors say. Behavioral health resources were harder to find in rural areas, being part of a larger health care system didn’t help, but belonging to a Medicaid accountable care organization did.

Inside STAT: Why Hong Kong could become a living laboratory for Omicron's next trick

A woman is tested for Covid-19 in Hong Kong. (Vincent Yu/AP)

In the two months since it first hit the world’s Covid-19 radar, scientists have generated an astonishing amount of information on the Omicron variant. Still, key questions remain about Omicron, as well as about its new subvariant, BA.2. Among them: How much more transmissible is BA.2 than its wildly transmissible parent? Answering questions like these can be challenging, sometimes even impossible, where so many people have been vaccinated or previously infected that it can be hard to tease out what is attributable to the virus itself or to built-up human immunity. But it turns out there is a place where clear answers to key questions may be within reach — if that place is really, really unlucky. That place is Hong Kong and in particular, its nursing homes. STAT’s Helen Branswell explains why.

Jumping from FDA to health tech startups

Since leaving his FDA post as deputy commissioner for medical and scientific affairs last year, Anand Shah has gone from toiling on the country’s Covid-19 response to a flurry of advisory roles at promising startups. He talked with STAT’s Mario Aguilar about joining the board of mental health app developer Big Health.

Lots of commercial payers have expressed hesitancy about covering digital therapeutics. Are payers too stringent?
The evidence demonstrating the utility of digital therapeutics is growing. The breadth of indications is expanding. I’m a big believer that it’s going to be the data that is most compelling, which is going to provide physicians and patients alike with a known medicinal alternative to traditional therapy.

What’s it like watching FDA from the outside now?
I have a tremendous appreciation for the dedicated professional staff of the agency. This is the greatest public health crisis of our lifetime and certainly over the past 100 years, and the demands on the men and women of the agency are tremendous.

STAT+ subscribers can read the full interview here.

Vaping and flavored cigarettes could reverse trends in tobacco control, report warns

Flavored tobacco products (including menthol cigarettes), vaping among young people, and possibly the pandemic threaten to turn back progress made in reducing tobacco use, according to the American Lung Association’s latest report on tobacco control. Adult smoking rates have fallen from 22% in 2003 to 14% in 2019 and high school smoking rates have dropped from 23% in 2002 to 5% in 2020, but more than 2 million high school and middle school students said they used e-cigarettes in 2021. A pandemic note: In 2020, cigarette sales increased for the first time in 20 years, but it’s unclear if this reflects higher adult smoking rates or existing smokers smoking more cigarettes, the association said, citing an FTC report.

What to read around the web today

Key senators propose an overhaul of how the U.S. prepares for pandemics. STAT
Hospitals use a lottery to allocate scarce Covid drugs for the immunocompromised. NPR
What risks? FDA scolds Lilly for misleading Instagram post about a best-selling diabetes drug. STAT+
Leprosy hospital offers healing, and a haven, to the shunned. New York Times
Pivotal study shows Sierra Oncology drug improves anemia and other symptoms of myelofibrosis. STAT+