Vanderbilt reports a rare cluster of viral infections, likely linked to COVID precautions

Vanderbilt Children’s Hospital has seen an unexplained cluster of viral infections in infants under three months old in what is likely one more example of COVID precautions changing how another virus spreads.

The parechovirus affects the central nervous system and has been around for a while, but it’s uncommon. Testing indicates the virus shows up every two years primarily in the summer months. But, that pattern was disrupted in 2020.

“We think that’s probably related to the social distancing, the masking, etc., that happened with COVID-19, and then, we saw this big peak in 2022,” says Dr. Ritu Banerjee, a pediatric infectious disease expert at Vanderbilt. “We don’t really know why.”

Vanderbilt doctors wrote about the cluster for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s weekly report on mortality. In 2018, before the pandemic and social distancing, the hospital saw 19 cases over five months. There were just seven cases in 2019, 2020 and 2021, combined.

Over the course of six weeks in April and May of this year, Vanderbilt treated 23 infant cases. Those were patients sick enough to be brought to the hospital and get a spinal tap to test for the virus. Banerjee says there must have been many more in the community who were just not sick enough to need hospitalization.

“It’s hard to know if Nashville had a higher prevalence of parechovirus infections than other regions, because we haven’t been doing that kind of population-based surveillance. These are just anecdotal reports,” Banerjee says, adding that the results were reported to the Tennessee Department of Health so the findings could be shared among other public health agencies.

The anecdotes are adding up. Children’s hospitals around the country are disclosing similar upticks. In Connecticut, one infant death has been attributed to parechovirus this summer.

The symptoms include fever, fussiness and feeding trouble, and there’s no anti-viral treatment. Most infants fully recover, though one from the Vanderbilt cluster had hearing loss and another developed seizures.