(Image courtesy of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention)
A child who died from flu is the first pediatric flu death in Washington State this season and King County’s first since the 2019-2020 flu season.
King County Public Health can only tell us the child, who died November 13th, was of elementary school age, but Public Health’s Doctor Eric Chow says it comes at a time of rapidly increasing case numbers for flu and RSV (Respiratory Syncytial Virus) with children’s hospitals and emergency rooms overwhelmed.
Chow says it’s a reminder that kids and older adults are especially vulnerable to the viruses going around right now, and he says kids are at greater risk because their immune systems are still learning, where we as adults acquire more immunity over time.
With such high activity for flu and RSV, Chow says it’s important to test to know which virus you or your kids might have if they’re sick because that will also determine if anti-viral drugs are an appropriate treatment, but he says check with your doctor first to see if testing is necessary, “whether that means that they need to come in for testing,” Chow says, “or there’s testing they can do at home for, say, like COVID-19 – those are principles to kind of set up and establish beforehand.”
Chow says the same is true before taking your child to the emergency room. He says first call an advice nurse or do a tele-health visit because with overflowing ERs, doctors, nurses and staff have to be there to take care of people who are really in need of their care because they have true emergencies, while not all illnesses warrant a trip to the ER, which makes that triage phone call or virtual visit that much more important.
Chow says while fevers, coughs and runny noses make it easier to tell if older kids are sick, he says it’s different with infants. Chow says, “When they’re ill, they present with things like irritability, decreased feeding, maybe they’re not as active, and so those are important additional symptoms to watch out for and to speak with a pediatrician about if a parent is concerned.”
Chow says even though there’s no vaccine for RSV, he urges you to make sure you and your kids 6-months or older have both their flu and COVID shots, and he says pregnant women should get the shots because they are at higher risk and that protection is passed to the baby. He also says remember our pandemic lesson: that masks, distance and regular hand washing do help slow the spread of these viruses.
