Kids & COVID info-hole for TX

This is driving me nuts and I just want to post out how ridiculous this is. It’s back to school time in Texas and I am wanting to verify if Delta is actually looking more virulent for children, as is being anecdotally mentioned. Texas is topping the charts in hospitalizations, especially TMC and Houston area, it would be great to know how many of these are children.

AAP has a great state breakdown https://www.aap.org/en/pages/2019-novel-coronavirus-covid-19-infections/children-and-covid-19-state-level-data-report/ . Disclaimer here for Texas is that we only report distribution “for only 3% of confirmed cases (80,313/2,759,325), resulting in an undercount of child cases; TX is excluded from some figures”. So this is something the hospitals absolutely have, and is definitely available. I aim to dig it up on Texas HHS site.

Texas Health and Human Services site appears to bury this, except broad overview of kid case count, nothing on severity, hospital admission, per county, over time, etc., https://www.hhs.texas.gov/about-hhs/records-statistics/data-statistics . BUT, publicly available is granular detail on “events by age, race/ethnicity, county, procedure, complication, and type of facility” (and time point) on pregnancy termination. Who tf cares during a pandemic affecting the kids that are currently born!! What is wrong with these priorities! I reached out for a data request and was told age distribution on hospitalizations for COVID is confidential and I need to request through their IRB (I currently work in this area, and this is not applicable, and this would be de-identified data). I am currently blaming Abbott for blocking this and deliberately burying it, but can’t find how this is specifically enacted yet. Would be great to know!