Last fall, children in China were coming down with respiratory illnesses earlier and in greater numbers than usual. [JAMA]

Ditto for respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) infections in the US and elsewhere in 2021 and 2022. And the current winter season doesn’t appear to be much different as far as higher-than-usual case numbers, according to CDC surveillance data.

The surging case numbers and their out-of-whack timing have fueled an ongoing debate about how the COVID-19 pandemic contributed to rates of other infectious diseases. No one yet knows for sure.

“Right now, this is phenomenology,” Wolfgang Leitner, PhD, chief of the Innate Immunity Section at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told JAMA in an interview. “People are assuming a lot about the mechanism.”

Much of the discussion has centered around immunity debt and immunity theft, terms born of the pandemic and not found in textbooks.

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