First COVID-19 lockdown resulted in most respiratory viruses disappearing among hospitalised children, with the exception of rhinoviruses.

Aim: Emergency room admissions have decreased globally during the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly for respiratory diseases. We evaluated hospital admissions for respiratory diseases in the first year of the Italian pandemic and compared them with the corresponding period in 2016-2017.

Methods: The study was carried out at the Sapienza University in Rome, Italy, and covered 9 March to 28 February 2020-2021 and 2016-2017. We tested 85 hospitalised children who were negative for the virus that causes COVID-19 in 2020-2021 and compared them with 476 hospitalised children from 2016-2017, as we had also tested nasal washing samples for 14 respiratory viruses during that period.

Results: Hospitalisations for acute respiratory tract infections were 82.2% lower in 2020-2021 than 2016-2017. The respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) and several other viruses were detected less frequently during the pandemic. An extraordinary finding was that rhinoviruses remained seasonal. In 2020-2021, we detected a virus in 54.1% of the hospitalised children: rhinoviruses in 41, RSV in 4 and other viruses in 1. This was significantly lower than the 71.6% in 2016-2017: RSV in 130, rhinoviruses in 128 and other viruses in 83.

Conclusion: Pandemic measures dramatically reduced childhood respiratory infections, particularly RSV, but were less effective at reducing rhinoviruses.