According to a current report from the Robert Koch Institute in Germany, the number of severe acute respiratory infections has increased, in some cases significantly, among people under 60 years of age. For small children and people aged 15 to 34 in particular, experts are reporting a sharp increase in the past week compared to the week before.
However, the incidence among young children is still well below the values of the same period last year and is “at the level of the pre-pandemic seasons”. The number of cases has fallen among those aged 60 and over. The data comes from random monitoring of severe acute respiratory infections in hospitals.
According to the information, infections with the respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) were diagnosed most frequently in children. A significant increase in RSV diagnoses in small children in recent weeks could therefore also be due to increased testing following the introduction of a nationwide RSV reporting requirement. The rate of RSV-positive samples in virological monitoring is still low.
Overall, the RKI assumes that there were around 7.2 million acute respiratory diseases in the population in the previous week, regardless of whether the patient was at the doctor or not. According to the report, there is currently no evidence of an incipient flu wave.
According to the RKI report, the number of laboratory-confirmed and reported corona infections last week was just over 22,000 (previous week: 21,800) and a total of almost 118,500 since the beginning of October. But that is only a small excerpt of what actually happened. Compared to the same period last year, the number of severe respiratory diseases caused by Sars-CoV-2 “remains relatively lower,” it said.
