Hospitals throughout the country are prepared for a hectic winter as growing flu rates and what some physicians refer to as COVID-19 complacency collide on already overburdened healthcare facilities.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, flu and other respiratory viruses are already on the rise in some regions of the United States, with the CDC reporting an increase in positive flu tests last week.
The CDC predicts that if COVID-19 restrictions are withdrawn and people return to their workplaces and classes, the number of flu cases will rise to pre-pandemic levels.
“It’s quite likely that we’ll see influenza coming back with a fury this winter,” Dr. Dan Uslan, UCLA Health’s co-chief infection prevention officer, told NBC News.
Australia is experiencing its worst flu season in five years, as federal health officials recently warned the United States could get hit just as hard with only 49% of Americans planning to get a flu shot this year, according to a National Foundation for Infectious Diseases survey.
“Data from the Southern Hemisphere are not good,” said Matthew Binnicker, director of clinical virology at the Mayo Clinic. “We need to double down on prevention measures,” such as physical distancing and masking.
While fewer Americans plan to get a flu shot, only 7.6 million Americans, out of 333 million total, have received the new COVID-19 booster aimed at Omicron that was released last month, according to a Kaiser Family Foundation survey. The foundation blamed the low numbers on a lack of public awareness about the new shot, after more than 225 million people got the initial COVID-19 vaccine.
“America is not rushing out to get the new booster. Most are only dimly aware of it, which is not surprising in a country that seems to have mostly moved on,” KFF President and CEO Drew Altman said in a statement. “The exception may be older folks, who are at great risk and early on are more interested in the new booster.”
While the number of COVID-19 cases continues to drop, there are still tens of thousands of new cases being diagnosed every day. And as winter sets in and more people move indoors, the number of respiratory viruses is expected to rise with hospitals ill-equipped to handle a surge.
“If you go around the nation and ask hospitals how busy they are, every single one of them will tell you they’re busy,” said Dr. Carlos del Rio, executive associate dean at the Emory University School of Medicine.
Front line nurses, burned out during the pandemic, have taken early retirement or quit to go into new lines of work leaving many hospitals struggling to recruit new people.
The number of healthcare workers quitting is 23% higher than when the pandemic began, according to Health System Tracker, which leaves little room to accommodate a large influx of patients.
“There’s no excess capacity in hospitals,” del Rio said. “Anything that increases the number of patients is going to tip the scales.”
