PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — Doctors at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia say now is the time for families to make sure they are on top of everyone’s vaccinations and boosters for the year. Without the masking and social distancing protocols of recent years, they say, this year’s cold and flu season is expected to hit hard.
Dr. Ron Keren, CHOP chief medical officer, says RSV, a respiratory virus, started circulating around the globe in April, which he says is unusually early. And the number of cases detected locally in September and October “has been extremely high.”
“In older kids and adults, RSV causes what we would call a common cold. You get a runny nose and a cough,” Keren said.
But infants with RSV are at a greater risk for developing a condition called bronchiolitis, he said. “Bronchiolitis is essentially inflammation and swelling of the small airways — and in young infants, who have very small, small airways, that causes difficulty with breathing, which can then lead to problems with drinking and eating and dehydration.”
Dehydration is one of the reasons children end up in hospital emergency rooms.
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Meanwhile, Keren said, childhood COVID-19 cases this season have been relatively flat or on the decline — “and we hope that that trend will continue, but it's hard to predict for sure what's going to happen in the next few months, especially as people start spending more time indoors.”
Now they're starting to see flu cases in the community.
“With relatively low influenza A numbers right now, and relatively low COVID numbers, it means that we all have time to get our kids vaccinated or boosted,” Keren said.
Dr. Katie Lockwood, pediatrics chair at CHOP, says there are many cold viruses that have no preventive vaccine, but there are vaccines for a lot of other preventable illnesses.
COVID-19 quarantines may have prevented families from staying up to date on their regular vaccine schedules, Lockwood said. Now is the time to get back on track.
“When we have a community at large who fall behind on vaccination rates, we lose some of that herd immunity that keeps communities safe from some of these vaccine-preventable diseases.”