U.S. struggles to cope with rising infant respiratory infections

DENVER, the United States, Nov. 2 (Xinhua) -- Hospitals in the United States have been operating at near capacity to cope with a spike in infant respiratory infections amid a shortage of children hospital beds and medical workers and the still-raging COVID-19 pandemic, multiple media outlets have reported.

Respiratory Syncytial Virus, or RSV, is a common respiratory virus that usually causes mild, cold-like symptoms. "It is the most common cause of pneumonia in children younger than one in the United States," said the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

"With RSV on the rise, and patients being treated for COVID-19, these viruses are impacting every hospital around," reported ClickOnDetroit, a news website.

Infants are the most severely affected group, and their sad stories have gained wide media attention as the hospitalizations for RSV are increasing rapidly.

"They were so full. The entire pediatric ward was full of RSV cases. It was horrific," Amanda Bystran, a mother of two living in Virginia, said in a CNN report.

The shortage of pediatric hospital beds should take the blame for the delayed child care. About 80 percent of pediatric hospital beds are occupied across the United States, said the report. In Rhode Island, the rate is 99 percent.

Since the outbreak of COVID-19, most U.S. states experienced decreases in pediatric inpatient unit beds, and nearly one-quarter of U.S. children experienced an increase in distance to their nearest pediatric inpatient unit, an analysis from Health Affairs pointed out.

Many community hospitals, the analysis said, chose to get out of the pediatric business to improve their profits. This is forcing hospitals around the country to transfer sick kids across states to receive care, reported NBC News.

In some cases, when hospitals do have empty beds, there are not enough medical workers to care for the sick. Children's National Hospital in Washington DC warned last week that "this surge in illness is exacerbated by the national healthcare workforce shortages."

A 2022 analysis found that the total count of nurses in the United States decreased by more than 100,000 from 2020 to 2021, the largest drop observed over the past four decades.

"The pediatric ICU specialty ... is highly specialized and difficult to recruit in hospitals today," Katie Boston-Leary, director of nursing programs at the American Nurses Association, said in a CNN report.

To make it worse, some children hospitals had no idea what was inflicting the rising number of hospitalized infants, resulting in misdiagnosis as common cold, which in some cases, led to deaths, according to ABC News.

The surge has caught doctors off guard also because cases of RSV and other respiratory viruses usually peak together in winter, while the COVID-19 pandemic is still spreading across the United States.

The weekly number of positive RSV tests rose more than fivefold from Aug. 13 to Oct. 15, data released by the CDC showed.

COVID-19 is also the leading cause of deaths in U.S. children, a CDC report said. All the respiratory viruses are together stretching the healthcare resources in the United States.

Nationwide, the CDC's Respiratory Syncytial Virus Hospitalization Surveillance Network (RSV-NET), a special monitor system for the disease, showed that RSV-associated hospitalizations in October 2022 were about twice the figures in 2021 and far higher than those in 2018, 2019, and 2020.