RSV, flu, covid put pressure on pediatric providers - TribLIVE

For those conditions, Bradford said, kids do need to be treated with antibiotics.

Raymond Pitetti, pediatric emergency medicine director at Children’s, said the surge, which aligns with a national rise in cases of the three viruses, is taking its toll on the ER team.

“The sheer volume of patients we are seeing is worse than it was during covid,” he said.

“We are seeing historic numbers in terms of volume coming into the emergency department, and it is really hard right now on staff.”.

Of the three viruses, covid cases are the most controlled, he said.

“We are still seeing, every day, a couple kids with covid, but nowhere near the numbers we were seeing before,” Pitetti said.

“The mitigation efforts we put into place for covid worked really well for RSV and the flu.

Fewer families are getting their kids get vaccinated against the flu, Pitetti said.

“Prior to covid, we really pushed flu shots,” he said.

“What we are seeing now is fewer kids are getting the flu vaccine.

At the beginning of November, Children’s put up a tent outside its Lawrenceville hospital to add resources to deal with the influx of patients sick with RSV.

The tent is still used whenever the number of patients coming in requires more room, Pitetti said.

“We use (the tent) when we need it, when all the rooms in the ER are filled and there are a large number of patients waiting to be seen,” he said.

“Prior to the pandemic, we had worked really hard to reduce our wait times and make sure patients were seen extremely timely.

The volume is hard, managing the patients is hard, and dealing with families who aren’t always understanding is really hard as well.”.

We still have some covid here and there and RSV definitely, but I would say by far the majority of my kids are testing positive for flu.”.

“We are seeing a lot of volume and a lot of kids coming to our offices, but the acuity is not high,” he said.

“We are not seeing a lot of what we would call high acuity — that’s very sick children — but we are seeing a lot of sick children.”.

“Especially when home testing for covid came around, parents would test their kids and keep them home if they had covid.

“Comparing this to what we had with covid, we were only seeing 60% of what we would normally see, and now we are seeing 110% of what we would see.”.

“The ones that we get really concerned about are babies that have a history of being premature or having cardiac disease that requires them to be on oxygen or are immunocompromised, or kids going through chemo, babies under the age of 1, kids with a history of bad asthma.”.

Gretchen Peske, an Excela Health Homecare Hospital liaison, said Excela sends children with more severe cases of RSV to Children’s for treatment.

“The facts that kids have been separated and masked for the past couple years, their bodies are not really good at handling viruses, so we are expecting it to be a pretty busy year all the way through March.”.

“When kids go back to school, that’s when we start to see these viruses circulating,” he said

Are they getting oxygen where they need to?" she said

For those conditions, Bradford said, kids do need to be treated with antibiotics