A country in Europe is seeing an increase in the number of instances of mysterious pneumonia in children, while China is continuing to experience an alarming upsurge.
Unexpectedly High Pneumonia Rates on Kids in Netherlands
While hospitals in China are bracing for a potential hospital shortage due to a tidal wave of respiratory infections among children, the surprisingly high number of pediatric pneumonia cases in the Netherlands is causing concern.
According to the Netherlands Institute for Health Services Research (NIVEL), 80 out of every 100,000 children in the nation treated for pneumonia between the ages of 5 and 15 were hospitalized last week. A further alarming increase--from 124 to 145 per 100,000--was seen in instances of pneumonia in toddlers less than four years old, the New York Post reported.
NIVEL, the research institution based in Utrecht, said this is the largest pneumonia widespread in the last several years.
In 2022, when the flu season was in full swing, there were 60 cases for every 100,000 children aged 5 to 15.
There has been an unexpected spike in pediatric pneumonia cases, and neither NIVEL nor the Netherlands' National Institute for Public Health and the Environment have been able to explain it.
Mysterious Rise in Pneumonia Infections in China
Meanwhile, there has been a frightening uptick in mysterious respiratory infections in certain regions of China, and it is unclear if this is related to the troubling trend in Europe.
Health authorities in China and the World Health Organization (WHO) both said that the pneumonia cases had not been associated with any novel or atypical infections.
The increase in infections is thought to be caused by children catching viruses that they had managed to avoid during the two years of COVID-19 restrictions, such as the flu, rhinoviruses, respiratory syncytial virus, and adenovirus.
This is the first flu season in China after the COVID-19 restrictions were relaxed at the end of 2022.
Chinese doctors have speculated that the population's immunity has been compromised due to a lack of exposure to common illnesses during the lengthy lockdown.
However, the COVID-era restrictions have long since been removed from the Netherlands, leaving experts to wonder what may have caused this recent upsurge in occurrences of pneumonia in children there.
The recent release of disturbing footage of overcrowded hospitals in Beijing and other northern Chinese cities with ill children and their parents has sounded the alarm all across the globe.
In an unprecedented move, the WHO openly requested data on clusters of pneumonia cases in China from health authorities. These clusters were later shown to be caused by recognized viruses.
Maria Van Kerkhove, the interim head of the WHO's department of epidemic and pandemic preparedness and prevention, said: "We asked about comparisons prior to the pandemic. And the waves that they're seeing now, the peak is not as high as what they saw in 2018-2019. This is not an indication of a novel pathogen. This is expected. This is what most countries dealt with a year or two ago."
