New Haven Register (New Haven, CT)
RSV illness widespread in Connecticut, affecting kids
Respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV, has arrived in Connecticut in large quantities this fall, sending hundreds of children to the hospital.
Here’s what to know about the disease driving severe illness among children in the state.
What is RSV?
RSV is a highly common respiratory virus that typically causes only mild cold-like symptoms but can be serious for infants and older adults. Early symptoms may include runny nose, decrease in appetite, coughing, sneezing, fever and wheezing, which can sometimes develop into pneumonia or inflammation of the small airways in the lung.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, an estimated 58,000 children younger than 5 years old are hospitalized each year due to RSV in the United States.
Though death from RSV is rare, the disease is estimated to kill about 160,000 people globally each year.
How bad is RSV in Connecticut?
RSV is one of the viruses contributing most significantly to overflowing emergency rooms at both Yale New Haven Children’s Hospital and Connecticut Children’s Hospital. One Connecticut parent reports taking his six-month-old
son to the hospital with RSV, only to spend four hours in a waiting room due to a lack of available beds.
According to a public online tracker, Yale Medicine recorded 106 cases of RSV from Oct. 9-15, more than any other disease except COVID and by far the most RSV of any week this year.
Hospital officials say they’re surprised not only at the quantity of RSV but also the timing. Whereas typically the virus arrives in the winter, this year it has appeared early.
Dr. Juan Salazar, physician-in-chief at Connecticut Children’s Medical Center, said the hospital has been “hit with a sledgehammer” by RSV in recent weeks.
“RSV typically is sometime in mid-to-late winter or the spring, never end of
summer or beginning of fall,” Salazar said. “It’s a volume of RSV that has kept our hospital full on a daily basis.”
Why is RSV spreading so quickly?
It’s not clear exactly why RSV has made such a dramatic impact in Connecticut this fall, but experts say the disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic over the past two years may be playing a role.
“COVID has kind of eliminated what used to be a fairly predictable pattern of respiratory viruses at different times of the year,” said Dr. Thomas Murray, associate medical director for infection prevention at Yale New Haven Children’s Hospital. “RSV used to be a primarily December virus, but now we’ve seen it in the summer, we’re seeing it now in October, so that’s an example of a virus that’s no longer behaving the way it used to.”
Murray, Salazar and others note that respiratory illnesses such as RSV and the flu largely disappeared during the first two winters of the pandemic due to the prevalence of masks and social distancing measures. Now, with those precautions no longer in place, kids are exposed to the viruses again, without much prior immunity to them.
“It’s likely that we have a group of children who have been more socially isolated and who wore masks for a couple years and may not have gotten the respiratory viruses that they would typically get in a year and so are more susceptible to getting infected,” Murray said.
What should parents know?
In most cases, RSV does not cause serious illness and symptoms pass in days or a couple weeks. However, young children may be particularly prone to severe infection if they were born prematurely or have chronic heart or lung disease or a weakened immune system.
Parents and other adults whose children are at high risk of severe RSV infection are advised to wash their hands often, avoid touching their face, avoid sick people, cover coughs and sneezes and clean and disinfect surfaces.