ACT Health was notified of 57 outbreaks of gastroenteritis in ACT childcare centres between January 1 and April 31 this year, compared with the five-year mean for the same period of about 21 outbreaks.

Infectious diseases physician and microbiologist Professor Peter Collignon said rates of viruses like gastro tended to ebb and flow over time.

However, experts were shocked to see cases of Respiratory Syncytial Virus (RSV) skyrocket in Canberra to about 10 times the average for December last year, well above the usual peak for its typical season.

RSV generally takes hold in late April and backs off by October. About 90 per cent of cases of RSV in Canberra in December were children presenting to the emergency department.

"[It's] very unusual, because usually that [spike] happens in winter," Professor Collignon said.

"But something similar was seen also in Western Australia and some of the other states, so it's very different.

"I think that's got to be all to do with what happened last winter, with people really restricting their movements when they had any illness at all.

"Then there were all these children that hadn't been infected [with RSV] and when people started moving around more, well, they got infected at an unusual time, which was December."

According to ACT Health, RSV causes respiratory and sometimes ear infections. While most children recover from it in eight to 15 days, some may develop conditions such as bronchiolitis or pneumonia and have to be hospitalised.

Professor Collignon said practitioners were able to identify more cases of infection nowadays thanks to better testing and laboratories.

He said that may go some way to explaining increased levels of illness, but peoples' complacency post-strict Covid restrictions could be a factor in recent spikes.

"There does seem to be more infections now, or in the last four or five months than, say, since a year ago," Professor Collignon said.

"There was a lot less movement [with Covid last year], people were more careful about getting around when they were sick and when their children were sick.

"So I think there is a bit of complacency that comes back with not being quite as strict about that, and that may be a factor in the increase of all types of infections as well."

Canberra mother Kathryn Sliwinski said her daycare had fantastic infection control measures in place, and did everything it possibly could to prevent the spread of viruses.

Her youngest child Harry Sliwinski had to miss his trial week at daycare because he came down with hand, foot and mouth disease.

That meant her return to work was interrupted, and he'd also had gastro and a cough since.

Ms Sliwinski wanted other parents to not be complacent, and said she'd seen parents giving their sick children panadol and sending them off to daycare.

"You'll see the kids running around with the double-barreled snot nose," she said.

"Gastro is one of the worst ones because you're not meant to go back to daycare until you have been 48-hours symptom free.

"You often will hear people talking [at] the office saying, 'My kids had gastro on the weekend', and yet you're all sitting in the same lunch room and you wonder why it's spreading.

"We're just so complacent with it."

Still, Ms Sliwinski recognised the flip side of the situation was that parents had to work, and some had little support in Canberra.

"I totally understand single parents, lower income families who are those that can't take that leave [from work]," she said.

"What are the alternatives?"

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Ms Sliwinski wondered whether some employers should consider increasing their workers' carer's leave entitlements, as did Northside Community Service executive director of operations Liam McNicholas.

He said families were under "a huge amount of pressures", and one of the biggest was being able to get access to childcare in the first place.

"The sector itself and the system is so complicated for families - that there are fees in place at all ... the work activity test, [issues] just around access adds all this additional pressure for families that they don't need," Mr McNicholas said.

He said levels of sickness in ACT childcare went up and down and, no matter how vigilant centres were, sickness in childcare was at times inevitable.

Hand, foot and mouth was not a notifiable disease to ACT Health, so it did not collate numbers on that.

A spokeswoman for the authority said it had been notified about 18 children aged under five who'd had chickenpox in Canberra this year as at April 29. That number was similar to in previous years.

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