Preprint Article Version 1 Preserved in Portico This version is not peer-reviewed

Disease Burden and Inpatient Management of Children with Acute Respiratory Viral Infections during the Pre-COVID Era in Germany: A Cost-of-Illness Study

Maren Alchikh
,
Tim O.F. Conrad
ORCID logo ,
Patrick E Obermeier
ORCID logo ,
Xiaolin Ma
,
Brunhilde Schweiger
,
Onya Opota
ORCID logo ,
Barbara A Rath
*
Version 1 : Received: 14 November 2023 / Approved: 15 November 2023 / Online: 16 November 2023 (10:35:52 CET)

A peer-reviewed article of this Preprint also exists.

Alchikh, M.; Conrad, T.O.F.; Obermeier, P.E.; Ma, X.; Schweiger, B.; Opota, O.; Rath, B.A. Disease Burden and Inpatient Management of Children with Acute Respiratory Viral Infections during the Pre-COVID Era in Germany: A Cost-of-Illness Study. Viruses 2024, 16, 507. Alchikh, M.; Conrad, T.O.F.; Obermeier, P.E.; Ma, X.; Schweiger, B.; Opota, O.; Rath, B.A. Disease Burden and Inpatient Management of Children with Acute Respiratory Viral Infections during the Pre-COVID Era in Germany: A Cost-of-Illness Study. Viruses 2024, 16, 507.

Abstract

Respiratory viral infections (RVI) are common reasons for healthcare consultations. The inpatient management of RVI consumes significant resources. From 2009-2014, we assessed the costs of RVI management in 4776 hospitalized chil-dren aged 0-18 years participating in a quality improvement program, where all ILI patients underwent virologic testing at the National Reference Centre followed by de-tailed recording of their clinical course. The direct (medical or non-medical) and indirect costs of inpatient management outside the ICU (“non-ICU”) versus management requiring ICU-care (“ICU”) added up to 2,767.14€ (non-ICU) vs. 29,941.71€ (ICU) for Influenza, 2,713.14€ (non-ICU) vs. 16,951.06€ (ICU) for RSV infections, and 2,767.33€ (non-ICU) vs. 14,394.02€ (ICU) for human rhinovirus (hRV) infections, respectively. Non-ICU inpatient costs were similar for all 8 RVI studied: Influenza, RSV, hRV, ade-novirus (hAdV), metapneumovirus (hMPV), parainfluenzavirus (hPIV), bocavirus (hBoV) and seasonal coronavirus (hCoV) infections. ICU-costs for Influenza however, ex-ceeded all other RVI. At the time of the study, Influenza was the only RVI with antivi-ral treatment options available for children, but only 9.8% of Influenza patients (non-ICU) and 1.5% of ICU-patients with Influenza received antivirals; only 2.9% were vac-cinated. Future studies should investigate the economic impact of treatment and pre-vention of Influenza-, COVID-19-, and RSV post vaccine introduction.

Keywords

influenza-like illness; respiratory virus; respiratory viral infection; direct medical cost; non-direct medical cost; social determinants of health

Subject

Public Health and Healthcare, Health Policy and Services

Copyright: This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Download PDF

Comments (0)

We encourage comments and feedback from a broad range of readers. See criteria for comments and our Diversity statement.

Leave a public comment
Send a private comment to the author(s)
* All users must log in before leaving a comment
Views 0
Downloads 0
Comments 0
Metrics 0
Get PDF Cite Share 0
Bookmark BibSonomy Mendeley Reddit Delicious
×
Alerts
Notify me about updates to this article or when a peer-reviewed version is published.
We use cookies on our website to ensure you get the best experience.
Read more about our cookies here.