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During a Jan. 7, 2022, U.S. Supreme Court hearing on the constitutionality of the Biden administration's workplace COVID-19 vaccine mandates, Justice Sonia Sotomayor weighed in on the seriousness of the highly virulent omicron variant, saying at one point: We have over 100,000 children, which we've never had before, in -- in serious condition and many on ventilators. A number of Snopes readers wrote to us noting that the statement didn't appear to jibe with the government's own statistics and asked us to verify whether she had actually said this. We compared the quote to the official transcript of the Supreme Court's oral arguments that day and determined that it was, in fact, correctly attributed to her. We compared Sotomayor's statement to recent U.S. government data and statements made on television by Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky and determined that Sotomayor was indeed incorrect when she said 100,000 children were in serious condition, with many on ventilators. Here is the quote in context, from the transcript: Sotomayor didn't say where she found that statistic, but the number was clearly wrong and by a very large margin. When Walensky, the CDC director, was asked about it on Fox News Sunday on Dec. 9, she didn't object to host Brett Baier's assertion that the actual number of U.S. children then hospitalized with COVID-19 was closer to 3,500. When Baier asked Walensky for the number of children on ventilators, she said she didn't know off the top of her head. If we've interpreted the HealthData.gov spreadsheet showing patient impact and hospital capacity correctly, there were roughly 4,600 U.S. children hospitalized with confirmed cases of COVID-19 -- nowhere near 100,000, obviously -- as of Jan. 10. Sotomayor's statement was therefore wildly inaccurate. We were unable to find data concerning the number of children on ventilators. Still, as Walensky attempted to make clear during her Fox News Sunday appearance, the real numbers are of grave concern. According to the CDC, an average of 672 children a day were being hospitalized with COVID-19 across the U.S. as of the week ending Jan. 2 -- an increase of 114% over the previous week and the highest number of pediatric hospitalizations of the pandemic thus far, Forbes reported on Jan. 5. The vast majority of these children are unvaccinated, and those under 5 years of age are not yet eligible to receive COVID-19 vaccinations.
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