How WA’s border closures could have caused Perth’s preschoolers to get sicker

WA’s hard border closures caused more young children to be hospitalised with common viruses like the cold or flu, than pre-pandemic, according to one of Perth’s top paediatricians.

University of Western Australia’s head of paediatrics, Professor Peter Richmond, says the state’s COVID lockdowns meant viruses such as influenza and RSV weren’t circulating in the community for some time, creating an immunity gap in young children.

“The restriction of transmission of viruses led to a deficit and development of natural immunity, so we then suddenly see these exposed children who have no immunity then getting sicker than they normally would,” he said.

Richmond said when the borders reopened, an epidemic of winter viruses saw a rise in the number of young children admitted to Perth Children’s Hospital in respiratory distress.

Many experienced a symptom known as viral induced wheeze – also diagnosed as bronchiolitis in babies under the age of 1 – both triggering airways to swell up and constrict breathing, similar to asthma.

“Sometimes with those children, even giving them ventolin and other forms of therapies, they end up in intensive care, and sometimes on a ventilator. And occasionally, young children with viral-induced respiratory infections can even die,” Richmond said.

Perth mum Lisa Bentley-Taylor’s twin four-year-olds Arie and Luca, born in 2020, both experienced bronchiolitis when they first started daycare at 12 months, and have since required multiple hospitalisations every winter.

“Generally, it’s their oxygen levels that we struggle to get up and that’s what keeps them in there for such prolonged periods of time,” she said.

The boys often spend up to a week in hospital, hooked up to monitors and oxygen machines, requiring steroids, adrenaline and ventolin.

Bentley-Taylor said only last month one of the twins experienced a particularly bad episode of croup and wheeze.

“It was just getting that ambulance here ASAP,” she said.

“He looked like he was almost turning blue to me and it was terrifying.”

Richmond said they were still trying to understand the increase in cases post-COVID.

“We’ve got a lot of respiratory researchers looking at what is the immune response in the airways that’s causing the children to get so sick,” he said.

However, Richmond claimed last year, virus-related hospitalisations actually dropped by nearly 600 patients for one specific reason.

“[It] was the first year we’ve probably seen a decrease in numbers of the young babies coming into hospital with wheezing, and that was because we had the RSV immunisation program,” he said.

But despite vaccinations reducing the severity of some viruses, only 20 per cent of WA children have received flu jabs this year, in what’s set to be one of the worst flu seasons in a decade.

“It’s not too late for parents to go out and get their children immunised, and we know that it’s a safe and effective way of protecting them from influenza and all its complications, including wheezing,” Richmond said.

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