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

Two diseases that typically affect children in the winter – pediatric flu and RSV – are virtually non-existent this year because of the COVID-19 pandemic, says a pediatrician in Utah.

The bad news: Both could return with revenge next year.

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

Most years, Pavia said, 80 children a week will be admitted to primary children with RSV, a third of whom will have to go to the intensive care unit.

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

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

Part of the flu drop can be credited to COVID-19 travel restrictions, Pavia said, because flu strains are usually carried by people traveling from other countries. Pavia added that masks, hand washing and social distancing are known to reduce the spread of the flu – and taking these public health measures for COVID-19 is “a natural experiment in which we control [the flu] really dramatic, “Pavia said.

The decrease in RSV, which is the respiratory syncytial virus, “is somewhat more astonishing,” Pavia said. A major symptom of RSV is runny nose, and nasal secretions are a major way in which the virus spreads – so masks and hand washing probably limit the amount of secretions.

Children under the age of 3, who are most sensitive to RSV, do not gather as much during the pandemic, with fewer play dates and day care visits, Pavia said. He also mentioned that older siblings who study online or have fewer school days in person do not bring so many viruses home.

All this explains why the RSV number would decrease, Pavia said, but not why “it is practically zero in the whole country”.

Some experts in theory discuss, although there is not yet much evidence to support it, said Pavia, “is that viruses interfere with each other. And when a virus dominates the jungle, it forces all the other animals, in essence. … Viruses have these weird interactions that we don’t fully understand. ”

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

“It is very likely that when both the flu and RSV are absent for a while, you will have more people fully susceptible to it,” Pavia said. “So when it does, it spreads more dramatically and we see a more severe disease.”

Influenza rates tend to fluctuate, Pavia said, with a mild year, often followed by a severe one. RSV, on the other hand, “depends a lot on having a new crop of children every year who are completely susceptible to RSV. In Utah, that’s another 50,000 good hosts for the virus attack. This year, we will have a whole year of babies who have never seen RSV. So next year, we will have twice as many naive babies who 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 brought its spread of COVID-19 under control. Recently, as COVID-19 restrictions were eased there, doctors have seen a huge increase in RSV during the Australian summer.

“RSV will do something really weird when he returns,” Pavia said. “We really can’t predict very well. Our feeling is that he will return and have a bad RSV year when he returns. ”