Objective

To describe whether the microbiological information of the respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), provided by four hospitals on a weekly basis, adequately captures the seasonality of the RSV in the entire community.

Method

Retrospective descriptive study. We compared the detection of RSV in respiratory samples of patients (hospitalized and not) from all age groups, from the 4 hospitals that are part of the microbiological surveillance system (MSS), with data from the Minimum Basic Data Set of hospitalization for bronchiolitis by RSV or another infectious organism, in patients under 5 years of age, admitted to any public hospital in Galicia (seasons 2008/2009 to 2016/2017). An epidemic wave period was considered when the positivity of RSV detections in the total respiratory samples of the SVM exceeded 10%. The sensitivity of the MSS was calculated as a percentage of admissions occurring in the epidemic wave.

Results

MSS sensitivity was 92% (86%-96%) for RSV bronchiolitis admissions in each season and 79% (75%-84%) for total bronchiolitis admissions.

Conclusions

The RSV microbiological surveillance system, based on data from only 4 hospitals, showed very good sensitivity to predict the start and end of the annual RSV wave throughout the Galician region. These results support the use of this information to alert the entire health system of the onset of the wave.

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