MILWAUKEE – Hospitals across the nation are experiencing a surge in respiratory illnesses among children.
And hospitals in Wisconsin aren’t immune.
University of Wisconsin assistant professor of adult and pediatric infectious disease Dr. Joseph McBride says practitioners are “without a doubt” seeing higher numbers of respiratory issues in children. He specifically points to “respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV.”
“RSV is a common seasonal virus that pediatricians, healthcare providers, young parents and families are well aware of year-in and year-out,” McBride says. “What’s interesting about RSV is that in the setting of COVID and all the mask use, it kind of threw off our normal seasonality of it. Usually it’s pretty predictable each year starting toward the end of fall, in to the winter during our normal cough-and-cold season that we would see spikes in RSV.”
Those spikes have happened sooner because our “normal seasonality is changing.” According to McBride, RSV rates in October are “as high as normally what we’d see in our worst winter months in years past.”
But McBride clarifies that it’s not just RSV, flu season too isn’t as predictable anymore because of COVID.
“We really haven’t settled into a normal of seasonality,” McBride says.
So will we ever return to normality in terms of seasons of sickness?
McBride says he “thinks we will over time,” but warns that he doesn’t have “any evidence to back that up.”
“If you look toward the southern hemisphere in places like Australia,” McBride says, “they are usually where we look at for kind of predicting how our winter month will be. Theirs was a little more predictable this year than they have been in the last couple of winters for them. So if that’s any indication, we might get back on our normal schedule for these. But it’s hard to know.”
Now decreasing the number of respiratory problems with children is a tricky task.
“It’s a really challenging task,” McBride says. “The year of 2020 really provides the best way that we have to do that. Things like wearing masks, having social distancing, not being around other people; hence there’s less of a risk of viruses being transmitted.”
McBride says he’s not “necessarily arguing” that we should do that but “you can certainly see that as being the case of how these things are being transmitted.”
