With many hospitals across the country overloaded, the number of hospitalizations of children for respiratory illnesses has skyrocketed, returning to pre-pandemic rates.
This is what data from the Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI) published Thursday reveals. For the period 2022-2023, respiratory diseases among the top 10 causes of hospitalization accounted for 32% of all hospitalizations among children aged 0 to 4 years, an increase of 20% compared to to the previous year.
For this age group, seasonal flu-related hospitalizations jumped from 33 to 2,444 cases. Although this increase is impressive, it is a number of cases similar to pre-pandemic data, said Tanya Khan, manager of clinical-administrative database operations at CIHI.
“The data released today does not look at the factors, but we presume that the relaxation of public health measures has notably led children to interact with a greater number of people and in contexts that were not previously not allowed the previous year,” explained Ms. Khan.
For example, the return of in-person classes, the resumption of team sports, the abandonment of compulsory mask wearing, among others for workers in daycare centers, “all these factors together can perhaps explain this increase”, says Ms. Khan.
Still among 0-4 year olds, the number of hospital stays due to a lower respiratory tract infection such as acute bronchitis increased from 9,501 to 19,909. In addition, an increase of 43% was observed for stays attributable to COVID-19.
“It’s true that cases have almost doubled, but for the year 2021-2022 we lived with more public health measures, so there was less chance of having viruses circulating and infections,” he said. explained Ms. Khan.
She points out that children have a less developed immune system than adults. This is therefore a population that is more affected by respiratory diseases, just like the elderly.
“It’s still upsetting to see the repercussions of respiratory illnesses among the youngest Canadians,” she commented. Our hospitals continue to have great difficulty managing requests for services, so we continue to look at the data to help the provinces and territories plan care.”
Toddlers are not the only ones affected by the spread of respiratory diseases. For young people aged 0 to 17, hospitalizations for pneumonia tripled and those for asthma almost doubled.
“For all pediatric hospitals across the country, the last year has been unprecedented, exposing significant gaps in the system. We know from experience that virus seasons will continue to affect our youngest patients. This is why it is so important to invest in our pediatric health care system and adopt public health measures to reduce risks,” said Dr. Lindy Samson, chief medical officer of health at the Center for Children’s Hospital, in a statement. children of Eastern Ontario and specialist in pediatric infectious diseases.
Ms. Khan hopes that the data released by CIHI will be useful for public health, prevention systems and care systems across Canada, and more particularly during influenza and viral seasons, when there are more viruses that circulate.
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