RSV oxygen levels during sleep?

[Lalarara10]

DD is 8 weeks old and we’re in hospital as she has RSV. From day 1 of admission she was only on 0.5l oxygen, not fast flow and has continued to make slow and steady progress.

For the last few days she doesn’t need any oxygen when awake, but needs 0.05l when asleep during the day. She seems okay overnight weirdly but for naps her oxygen levels dip to 89% and she requires oxygen. From this point we don’t seem to be moving forward and we can’t go home. We’ve been here a week and I was wondering if anyone has had a similar experience and how long it took them to see enough improvement to go home?

My son contacted RSV a week before discharge from another health problem, it took a month for him to be able to come home and that was with a nappies chap machine.
I would say if she's only in for the RSV than she should hopefully be recovered enough in another week.

We had this with bronchiolitis and pneumonia for DS at 7 months.

We were told that if he was able to bounce his sats back up himself, then a brief drop was acceptable. (He would drop briefly below 90 in active sleep for a couple of seconds, not long enough to trigger the alarm, and then get back up without intervention).

We had about a week of being in your situation before DS went on high-flow oxygen and that is what sorted him out. It allowed him to reinflate the lung and give him time to recover. We were in for two weeks and maybe four days on high-flow We were allowed home when the drops became few and far between in air and he was more energetic in himself, eating and drinking etc with normal obs.

I think we were told 90 and above in sleep were okay in the immediate recovery period, but that might be incorrect - there was very little sleep happening so my memory may well be flawed!

I hope DD recovers swiftly and you can all get home.

Your LO will get back to 90 and above during sleep. It's hard when they are tiny and RSV makes them SO snotty, but that should be clearing for your LO any day now. My 7 month old needed two nights on oxygen to go home (and honestly I should have taken her in a day or two before we did, with hindsight). The threshold to go home used to 94% asleep, 90% was the magic number than came out of a study to see if that could be safely lowered. Who knows how long my baby would have been in if we'd had to get to 94%!

Hopefully this is the last bad winter for RSV now that the vaccine is coming in 🙏

Thanks for the insight all! We ended up leaving a day later as any dips ended up correcting themselves quickly with a cough or sniff so we were discharged and all is well at home! 7 days in there in total.