In October 2021, the US Food and Drug Administration granted emergency use authorization for the BNT162b2 (Pfizer-BioNTech) COVID-19 vaccine to be used in children aged 5 to 11 years to reduce costly hospitalizations. By that time, for children in this age group, there had been 1.8 million people diagnosed with SARS-CoV-2 infection and 143 deaths, with more than 8000 hospitalizations. 1 However, very little is known about the severity of these hospitalizations relative to the 2 most common childhood viruses, the influenza virus and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), which resemble the SARS-CoV-2 virus. In this study, we compared the January through March 2021 hospitalizations of children aged 5 to 11 years who were diagnosed with SARS-CoV-2 infection and multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children (MIS-C; a sequela of COVID-19 disease) 2 with those hospitalizations of children aged 5 to 11 years infected with influenza and RSV.Methods | This cross-sectional study was conducted from September 17 to December 13, 2021, using 2021 quarterly inpatient data from the Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. These data were from the first 11 states with complete first-quarter data