A doctor at Starship is urging parents to care for their child as best they can first if they contract respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), as the hospital faces unprecedented demand.
“Our intensive care is really full at the moment with sick babies and young infants,” the hospital’s clinical director Dr Mike Shepherd told Breakfast.
“It’s a very common illness. We don’t want to cause alarm to parents generally … almost all children get this illness and get better again really by themselves with a bit of support and love from their whānau.”
He said doctors were seeing “surges” of the virus, which they believe is the culmination of two years’ worth of first-time infections for young people. It comes after last year’s Covid-19 lockdown prevented RSV’s widespread transmission.
The spike is putting “a lot of pressure on the [health] system”, he said.
Before going to the hospital, if symptoms weren’t severe, Shepherd urged parents to keep their childrens’ fluids up, call Healthline and use Paracetamol to manage fevers and runny noses.
He said if parents were worried, they should go to their GP.
He said hospitals, if possible, should only be seeing severe cases of RSV where children are having difficulties breathing or feeding.
RSV is a common virus that’s highly contagious and spreads through coughing and sneezing droplets that contain the virus. Almost all children contract the virus before age two.
For healthy adults and older children, symptoms are often mild. Symptoms of RSV include a stuffy or runny nose, sore throat, headache, cough, wheezing, fever and a decrease in appetite.
In serious cases in infants, it can turn into bronchiolitis or pneumonia.
The Ministry of Health said it was concerned about the rising number of RSV cases in the country.
In May, the total reported cases of RSV was 19. By June, there were close to one thousand cases.
Starship had to cancel elective surgeries to handle the demand, Shepherd said. Extra staff had also been stood up.
“We’re really having to focus on this acute load of work and make sure we keep everyone safe.”
At Hawke's Bay Hospital, five young babies and small children needed oxygen because of the virus.
Meanwhile, Middlemore Hospital is dedicating an entire ward to treat babies who were having difficulties breathing with RSV.
The Director-General of Health Dr Ashley Bloomfield said yesterday the situation was the worst he's seen in his career.
The Director-General of Health says more children seem to be susceptible to the virus this winter.
"It is a classic thing that happens every winter, like the flu peak, once again this year as happened last year we are seeing very little rise in flu cases,” Bloomfield said yesterday.
"However, with RSV we had very little cases last year and this year we are seeing the usual increase in these cases and there is some speculation this may be exacerbated by the fact we didn’t have any last year so there is a bigger pool of children susceptible to it."
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