The White House is resisting calls from pediatric health groups to declare a national emergency over the surge in respiratory illnesses in children.
Last week, the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Children’s Hospital Association urged the federal government to take action, arguing that an emergency declaration would grant more resources to help the health system.
In a letter sent to President Biden and Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra last week, the two organizations said the “unprecedented levels” of RSV and rising flu infections warrant a dual declaration of a national emergency along with a public health emergency, reports The Hill.
“We need emergency funding support and flexibilities along the same lines of what was provided to respond to COVID surges,” the organizations wrote.
However, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has indicated a national emergency is not needed at the time.
“We have offered jurisdictions support confronting the impact of RSV and influenza and stand ready to provide assistance to communities who are in need of help on a case-by-case basis,” an HHS spokeswoman said, according to CGTN.
Doctors at Children’s Hospital in New Orleans, Louisiana, said last week that half of the children hospitalized have some type of respiratory infection, brought on by viruses like the flu, RSV, adenovirus, and rhinovirus.
Two years of wearing masks, social distancing, and isolation have made more people less immune to the viruses, said Louisiana’s state health officer Joseph Kanter.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data showed that the child hospitalization rate for the week of November 12 peaked at 17.5 out of every 100,000, a rate that was twice as high as any other season on record.
Healthcare systems overwhelmed
PBS is calling the surge in flu, RSV, and COVID in children a “tridemic.” More than three-quarters of pediatric hospital beds nationwide are occupied, seniors are hospitalized at a higher rate for respiratory illness and flu hospitalizations are at a decade-level high.
Dr. Megan Ranney is a practicing emergency room physician and academic dean at the Brown University School of Public Health. In an interview with PBS, she pointed out that the U.S. healthcare system has been underfunded for decades.
There is also a shortage of healthcare workers in the U.S. New data published in The Lancet earlier this year showed the world had a global shortfall of at least 43 million healthcare workers before the pandemic even started.
And with the Covid-19 pandemic, we found out just how underprepared we were for an emergency like the pandemic. Dr. Ramsey says problems that came to light were actually not new but just made worse.
“Unfortunately, they have worsened, because we have lost staff, because we have seen hospitals, and particularly pediatric beds, close over the course of the pandemic.”
Some of the symptoms of the flu, the respiratory virus, and the coronavirus are relatively similar, and this makes it difficult for parents to distinguish between the illnesses as cases are spiking nationwide.
