Over 3.5mn child Covid cases reported in US in Jan

Over 3.5 million child Covid-19 cases were reported in the US in January, marking "a dramatic spike" during the Omicron variant surge, according to a new report.

The report by the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) and the Children's Hospital Association released on Monday said that more than 11.4 million children in the country have tested positive for Covid-19 since the onset of the pandemic in early 2020, Xinhua news agency reported.

Nearly two million of these cases have been added in the past two weeks.

For the week ending January 27, over 808,000 additional child Covid-19 cases were reported in the country, said the AAP, adding child cases this week remained "extremely high", triple the peak level of the Delta surge in 2021.

This marked the 25th week in a row child Covid-19 cases in the US were above 100,000.

Since the first week of September 2021, there have been almost 6.4 million additional child cases, according to the AAP.