The number of hospital visits for enterovirus last week rose 8.2 percent from a week earlier to 16,729, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said yesterday.
The increase came after the CDC on Tuesday last week said that enterovirus activity had peaked and cases were slowly declining.
However, no new cases with severe complications were reported since the previous week, CDC Epidemic Intelligence Center Deputy Director Lee Chia-lin (李佳琳) said.
Photo: CNA
The main strains circulating over the past four weeks are still Coxsackie A viruses, she said.
A six-year-old boy last week was reported to have enterovirus D68, which can cause severe respiratory illness, but he only had mild symptoms and has recovered, Lee said.
Although enterovirus activity has peaked, it remains at a plateau, and cases are expected to drop noticeably after children go on summer vacation, CDC Deputy Director-General Tseng Shu-hui (曾淑慧) said.
As many people are expected to travel over the Dragon Boat Festival long weekend from Saturday to Monday, adults and children should practice good personal hygiene, wash their hands with soap frequently and take other preventive measures, Tseng said.
Alcohol-based sanitizers are ineffective against enteroviruses, so people should use diluted bleach to disinfect the environment, she said.
Meanwhile, the CDC last week announced that it would expand eligibility for a government-funded PPSV23 pneumococcal vaccine dose to people aged 50 to 64, until stock runs out.
Tseng said that many people were eager to get the vaccine in the first week, so there were only about 54,000 doses left as of Monday.
The remaining doses are expected to run out this week, so people are advised to ask the healthcare facility if it still has stock before going to get vaccinated, she said.
However, people aged 65 or older are still eligible for a dose of the pneumococcal 13-valent conjugate vaccine (PCV13) and a dose of PPV23, covered by the government, Tseng said.
Feng Jia-yih (馮嘉毅), director of Taipei Veterans General Hospital’s Department of Chest Medicine, said he has treated a 92-year-old female with a history stroke and arrhythmia, who was rushed to the emergency room with a fever and difficulty breathing after experiencing common cold symptoms.
As the woman had seriously low blood oxygen and respiratory failure, she was intubated and put on ventilator, and later tested positive for Streptococcus pneumoniae, he said, adding that she had not been vaccinated.
Feng said there are not many effective vaccines to prevent pneumonia, but they have been proven to be very effective in preventing invasive pneumococcal disease caused by Streptococcus pneumoniae.
Showing a graph of the incidence rates of invasive pneumococcal disease among different age groups between 2011 and last year, he said that after infants became eligible for the government-funded PCV13 vaccine about a decade ago, the incidence rate clearly dropped among young children and elderly people, implying herd immunity due to wide vaccination.
The CDC also reported that 263 people were hospitalized for COVID-19 last week, while 26 people died — both slightly higher figures than the previous week.
Of the cases since the XBB.1.5-adapted COVID-19 vaccine became available in late September last year, about 94 percent of the people who were hospitalized or died had not received the new vaccines, Lee said, adding that 79 percent of people who were hospitalized and 90 percent of those who died were elderly people.
The first dose and second dose XBB.1.5-adapted vaccine coverage rate among elderly people is 20.47 percent and 1.47 percent respectively, so the CDC is encouraging high-risk groups to get vaccinated.
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