Economy 10 April 2025, 1:30pm

Proportion of RSV hospital admissions on the rise in Hungary

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More than 170,000 people still sought medical help for acute respiratory infection (ARI), including 22,000 with influenza-like illness (ILI) in Hungary on the 14th week of 2025, but the epidemic continues to wide down. Respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) has been the top reason of hospital admissions for the fourth week in a row. with over 80% of RSV patients aged two years or younger.

In terms of both ARI and ILI we are worse off than either last year or in the 2022/23 respiratory season.

The infection figures per 100,000 inhabitants show that in terms of ARI the situation is worse than one and two years, and the ILI status is also slightly worse than two years ago and worse than in any of the other respiratory seasons of the past 14 years.

The positivity rate for COVID-19 has been around 0% since the 8th week, and it has come down to 18.3% for influenza but rose to 14.2% from 12.2% for respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), with the latter index up for the third week in row.

There were 216 cases of human metapneumovirus (HMPV) in total by the end of the 14th week, which corresponds to 2.5% of all samples tested (8,560). There were fewer infections last year, 146 or 2.2% of all samples tested.

On the 14th week, there were 170 people in hospital with severe acute respiratory infection (SARI), down from 185 a week earlier. The situation was better a year ago (128), and also two years ago (166). 15 patients required intensive care (8.8% of all SARI patients), a drop from 29 on the 13th week (15.7%).

The share of RSV infections among those admitted to a hospital with SARI rose further to 30.6%, up from 29.2%, which compares with 21.9% a year ago, and only 3.0% two years ago. The percentage of SARI patients with influenza dropped to 7.1% from 14.6% on the 13th week, which compares with 4.7% in 2023/24 and 6.0% in 2022/23.

More than 44% of the SARI patients were less than 2 years old on the 14th week, while the proportion of this age group remains high (almost 83%) among SARI patients admitted with RSV. The situation was only slightly better a year ago, when none of SARI patients were in this age group and "only" 67.9% of RSV patients were under two years old.

In the first 13 weeks of 2025, the number of reported cases of suspected hepatitis A infection increased almost 7 times compared to the same period last year, according to the latest data by the National Centre for Public Health and Pharmacy (NNGYK). The most affected areas are Budapest, and Pest county with a couple of cases in Hajdú and Szabolcs counties. The number of new infections (38) in the 13th week of 2025 was the third highest so far this year.

Earlier this week, he NNGYK also released the number of suspected pertussis cases for the 13th week, showing a drop to 3 from 6 cases on the 12th week. About 30% of the infections were in infants, 47% were in children up to 14 years of age, 53.7% were in children up to 19 years of age, and almost 15% of the infections were in people over 60 years of age.