RSV, a highly contagious respiratory virus, is landing infants and toddlers in emergency rooms at record rates, straining hospitals and sounding the alarm for a tough winter ahead.
Visits to emergency departments for young children for respiratory issues are now at a higher level than at any point during the pandemic, hospital officials said.
COVID-19 precautions like masking and social distancing once helped prevent the spread of the virus — but with many precautions now cast aside, New York’s youngest are getting sick. Respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV, is landing record numbers of children under 5 in the hospital and overwhelming pediatric units.
“We are working at a much higher volume of patients than I’ve seen in my 15 years here,” Dr. James Schneider, chief of the pediatric critical care unit at Cohen Children’s Medical Center in Queens, said. “We’re seeing many more children in this ICU than I’ve ever seen at any one particular time.”
“It’s definitely leading to a lot of extra work by physicians, by nurses, by respiratory therapists — and we need to find alternative care space to provide the appropriate level of care for all the kids who require hospitalization,” Schneider added.
RSV is a common virus that usually causes mild cold-like symptoms, according to the CDC. . While most people recover in a week or two, the virus can be serious for infants and older adults. A small portion of the population — about 1% — faces serious symptoms.
In an average year, this isn’t a problem. However, this year has essentially seen a backlog in RSV cases. Over the past two years, public health measures like mask-wearing and social distancing have done their job to protect people from infectious diseases, doctors said.
Now that many of those measures have been dropped, immune systems are more vulnerable.
“It’s just we’re getting cohorts that weren’t exposed the prior couple years. in addition to this year’s cohort,” said Jennifer Lighter, MD, hospital epidemiologist and pediatric infectious disease specialist at Hassenfeld Children’s Hospital at NYU Langone.
The surge is part of what doctors are calling a “tripledemic” — RSV rising at the same time as an early arrival of flu season and a rise in COVID cases as the weather gets colder.
“The number of people getting sick, and needing medical care, particularly in young children, those under the age of 5, has increased dramatically over the past month,” Dr. Jay Varma, director of the Cornell Center for Pandemic Prevention and Response. “And if you look at just the visits to emergency departments alone, which is a pretty good proxy for how sick people are in the community, it’s already exceeded the rate of visits during the Omicron peak.”
Varma said, he’s worried about the strain on COVID-ravaged hospital resources.
“Anytime it’s overwhelmed by one preventable health problem, it creates problems for other people,” Varma said.
Dr. Tsoline Kojaoghlanian, a pediatric infectious disease specialist at Maimonides Children’s Hospital, said she’s seeing one in five RSV tests come back positive — rates usually seen at peak season in mid-winter.
Maimonides has expanded its available intensive care unit beds to accommodate the surge, she said.
“We need to be prepared,” Kojaoghlanian said. “We need to be aware and we need to hopefully teach some preventive measures to the parents to the day-care centers to the schools to try to mitigate this viral surge this winter.”
Both Gov. Hochul and Mayor Adams have recently stated their confidence in hospitals managing the rise in hospitalizations. But doctors remain alert.
“We’re not making plans for this to be over in the next week or two, that’s for sure,” Schnieder said.
