Via The Texas Tribune: Texas children’s hospitals are under siege from RSV and COVID-19. Excerpt:
Estefani López’s 11-month-old baby was struggling to breathe. The little girl, Ava Rivera, had contracted COVID-19 and began having seizures. Then her pulse weakened. Her mom couldn’t feel her taking breaths anymore.
López rushed her to an emergency room where they began initial treatments, putting tubes down her throat to pump her lungs with oxygen. But the baby’s condition required care at a pediatric hospital and none of the ones in the Houston area could take her in. They were all full.
Instead, López had to watch as hospital staff placed her baby in a helicopter to be airlifted 150 miles away to Temple for emergency care at the nearest children’s hospital with space. López spent the next three hours driving to the hospital, praying her baby would survive.
“I felt like my heart fell out of my chest. I didn't know what was happening for three hours,” López said. “It felt like it was three days.”
More children are being treated in Texas hospitals for COVID-19 than ever before. But there’s a second factor that is putting pediatric hospitals on the path to being overwhelmed: an unseasonable outbreak of respiratory syncytial virus or RSV, a highly contagious virus that can require hospitalization mostly among children five years and younger and especially infants.
During the last year, RSV was largely dormant, which experts believe was due to people masking up during the pandemic. Now, in just the last several weeks, thousands of Texas children have tested positive for the virus.
In addition, the delta variant of COVID-19 appears to affect unvaccinated children more often than previous variants. It’s unclear if children are also becoming sicker from it than from other variants of COVID-19. And with the regular flu season approaching, medical experts are concerned over how hospital capacity could be affected.
Over 5,800 children in Texas were newly hospitalized with COVID-19 in the seven-day period ending on Aug. 8, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a 37% increase from a week prior. Nationwide, nearly 94,000 children contracted COVID-19 last week, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Children’s Hospital Association.
López's daughter is doing OK now. Doctors replaced the intubation treatment with a nasal tube, her fever broke, and she was able to go home the next day.
But the situation in children’s hospitals continues to worsen. In Texas, it’s getting harder and harder for those hospitals to meet the combined demand for beds for COVID-19 and RSV patients as well as children with other conditions or injuries. And physicians fear what will happen with the reopening of schools, with far fewer children masked and far more attending in person than last year.
