A Utah pediatrician says two almost zero childhood viruses, a “good side effect of COVID-19”

Two diseases that often severely affect children in the winter – pediatric flu and RSV – are virtually non-existent this year due to the COVID-19 pandemic, according to one of Utah’s most important pediatricians.

The bad news: they could both come back in revenge next year.

At Intermountain Primary Children’s Hospital, doctors have not hospitalized any children with RSV this season, and only one child in Utah has been hospitalized for the flu, said Dr. Andrew Pavia, director of epidemiology at Primary Children and head of University of Utah Health pediatric infectious diseases.

Most years, Pavia said, 80 children a week would be admitted to primary school children with RSV, and a third of them would have to enter the intensive care unit.

As for the flu, Pavia said, the Federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has reported 1,400 cases of pediatric flu nationwide, when, in an average year, “that number would be in the range of 500,000, ”he said.

“We’re seeing something I’ve never seen in the last 35 years,” Pavia said Monday during Intermountain Healthcare’s weekly session on community coronavirus on Facebook Live. “It’s really one of the good side effects, if you will, of the COVID-19 pandemic.”

Part of the flu decline can be attributed to COVID-19 travel restrictions, Pavia said, as flu strains are often carried by people traveling from other countries. Pavia added that masks, hand washing and social distancing are known to decrease the spread of influenza and that taking these public health measures for COVID-19 is “a natural experiment in which we are controlling [the flu] very dramatically, ”Pavia said.

The drop in RSV, which means respiratory syncytial virus, “is a little more puzzling,” Pavia said. A major symptom of RSV is nasal discharge and nasal secretions are the main form of virus spread, so masks and hand washing are likely to limit the amount of these secretions.

Pavia said children under the age of 3, who are more susceptible to RSV, are not congregating as much during the pandemic, with fewer play dates and daycare visits. He also pointed out that older siblings who learn online or have fewer face-to-face school days don’t bring as many viruses home.

All of this explains why RSV numbers would fall, Pavia said, but not why “it’s virtually zero across the nation.”

One of the experts in theory is arguing, although there is still not much evidence to back it up, Pavia said, “is that viruses interfere with each other. And when a virus dominates the jungle, it forces all the other animals, essentially. … Viruses have these weird games that we don’t fully understand. ”

These low flu and RSV rates are unlikely to last next year, Pavia said.

“It’s very likely that when the flu and RSV are absent for a while, you have more people totally susceptible,” Pavia said. “So when it arrives, it spreads more dramatically and we see more serious diseases.”

Influenza rates tend to fluctuate, Pavia said, with a mild year often followed by a severe one. The RSV, on the other hand, “depends a lot on each year having a new culture of babies who are completely susceptible to RSV. In Utah, there are 50,000 other good hosts to attack the virus. This year, we will have a whole year of kids who never saw RSV. So, next year, we will have twice as many naive babies as are susceptible to it ”.

Doctors in Western Australia, Pavia said, noticed that RSV was largely absent there in June and July, when it is winter in the southern hemisphere, while the country controlled its COVID-19 extension. Recently, as restrictions on COVID-19 have eased, doctors experienced a huge rise in RSV during the Australian summer.

“RSV will do something really weird when he comes back,” Pavia said. “It simply came to our notice then. Our gut feeling is that he will roar again and we will have a bad year of RSV when he returns ”.