The social media images from China are a heart-rending déjà vu with photos of young children connected to intravenous lines receiving fluids from overcrowded hospital waiting rooms.
For a world still reeling from the recent coronavirus pandemic, news from China about a sudden rise in respiratory ailments has prompted understandable concern.
Just 4 years ago, a mysterious respiratory illness started to spread in China (SARS-CoV-2), and a lack of transparency by government officials cost other countries needed time to prepare.
In Beijing, worried parents seeking help for their children are having to wait at least a day, even for emergency care. The Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention reported more than 3500 cases of respiratory infection admitted to the Children’s Hospital.
In Liaoning Province, almost 500 miles away from Beijing, there are more reports of sick children overwhelming hospitals.
Chinese media blame the outbreak on mycoplasma pneumonia, sometimes called walking pneumonia, which is a bacterial infection that usually causes upper respiratory tract symptoms but can also prompt more serious lung issues and pneumonia.
In the United States, the weekly percent of emergency department visits for children with diagnosed pneumonia was about 2% as of the latest Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) report November 25, 2023, which is average for this time of year, although the agency is already reporting a slight increase above typical levels for children aged 5-17 years.
Sick Children
Chinese authorities from the National Health Commission held a news conference on November 13, 2023 to talk about the new rise in respiratory illnesses. Colder weather paired with China lifting stringent COVID restrictions has authorities attributing the latest wave of illness to what is sometimes called an immunity gap with an anticipated surge of circulating known pathogens.
But troublingly, a Program for Monitoring Emerging Diseases (ProMed) report noted that many of the children in China were not coughing and didn’t really have other symptoms other than a high fever. Some children developed pulmonary nodules.
This has prompted specialists to question whether these new clusters could be evidence of undiagnosed pneumonia caused by a novel pathogen.
Since mid-October 2023, the World Health Organization has monitored data from Chinese surveillance systems showing increases in respiratory illnesses. And on November 22, the United Nations health agency asked China to provide more epidemiologic and clinical information and lab results from these reported cases as well as data about recent trends in circulating respiratory pathogens.
By November 24, China reported no unusual or novel pathogens in the clusters of pneumonia cases.