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With only a quarter of all children aged 12-15 years fully vaccinated against COVID-19, first vaccinations continued to drop and new cases for all children rose for the second consecutive week.

Just under 25% of children aged 12-15 had completed the vaccine regimen as of July 12, and just over one-third (33.5%) had received at least one dose. Meanwhile, that age group represented 11.5% of people who initiated vaccination during the 2 weeks ending July 12, down from 12.1% a week earlier, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said. The total number of new vaccinations for the week ending July 12 was just over 201,000, compared with 307,000 for the previous week.

New cases of COVID-19, however, were on the rise in children. The 19,000 new cases reported for the week ending July 8 were up from 12,000 a week earlier and 8,000 the week before that, according to a report from the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Children’s Hospital Association.

That report also shows that children made up 22.3% of all new cases during the week of July 2-8, compared with 16.8% the previous week, and that there were nine deaths in children that same week, the most since March. COVID-related deaths among children total 344 in the 46 jurisdictions (43 states, New York City, Puerto Rico, and Guam) that are reporting such data by age. “It is not possible to standardize more detailed age ranges for children based on what is publicly available from the states,” the two groups noted.

Such data are available from the CDC’s COVID Data Tracker, however, and they show that children aged 16-17 years, who became eligible for COVID vaccination before the younger age group, are further ahead in the process. Among the older children, almost 46% had gotten at least one dose and 37% were fully vaccinated by July 12.

This article originally appeared on MDedge.com, part of the Medscape Professional Network.