RS virus outbreak causes full children’s ICs’

Almost all intensive care units for children in the Netherlands are full due to an outbreak of the contagious RS virus. This concerns 90 beds in seven hospitals. That says Hans van Goudoever, pediatrician and head of the Emma Children’s Hospital in Amsterdam and spokesperson for the Dutch Association for Pediatrics. „At the moment there is still one place in Maastricht and that’s it.” Not all IC beds are occupied by RS patients. In Amsterdam this is about half.

From virus outbreak het is exceptional in summer. Usually there is a peak in winter. The RS virus was first detected a few weeks ago in the Rotterdam region and has subsequently spread to the rest of the country. This probably has to do with the corona measures: by keeping a distance, the RS virus has probably not been able to get around and children have no immunity built up.

The doctor does not dare to say whether the peak has already been reached and is now going to fall. “In the winter we normally see a peak of six weeks with such an epidemic. But we have no idea how the virus will develop in the summer.” In principle, the virus is not very serious for children, he says. The symptoms of the RS virus resemble those of a cold. The virus can cause shortness of breath, especially in babies and toddlers. One in a hundred children is admitted to hospital and 10 percent of that group ends up in intensive care, where they are often “quite short” according to Goudoever. In the Netherlands, hardly any children die from the disease, says the pediatrician.

‘Extreme image’

from a sample of 21 laboratories shows that the RS virus in the Netherlands rose from 37 reports in mid-June to 139 in the week of 5 to 11 July. Epidemiologist Anne Teirlinck of the RIVM cannot yet say whether the virus has already been reduced. “If you look at data from previous outbreaks, you see that the graph keeps going up very steeply and then going down very steeply.”

She calls the image she now sees in the summer “very extreme”. The fact that it is now summer vacation can help reduce the virus. Children cannot infect each other at school, for example. “But we don’t know for sure. We have an epidemic that we normally don’t have in the summer,” Teirlinck said. “It is more difficult to predict how long it will take and how high the peak will be.”

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