'Hospitals are bursting at the seams'

While Covid-19 alone isn't straining hospitals and staff to the same degree it was during earlier waves, capacity issues, workforce shortages and the nation's ongoing surge of respiratory viruses are now placing unprecedented pressure the healthcare system.

For months, news of a respiratory syncytial virus surge dominated headlines. Then came influenza's early arrival, which went on to become the worst flu outbreak in more than a decade. 

"We definitely have days during a typical respiratory season when we are at capacity or over capacity, but what we have never seen before was the numbers of requests for transfers of patients and the number of consecutive days where we were not just at capacity, but overflowing and having to turn away hundreds of transfer requests, we got creative like many other institutions did, and have now permanently added an emergency room fast track up in our clinic space that's staffed by additional people to help move through some of the lower acuity, less sick patients so that our ER has time and space to see the more critically ill children." said Allison Bartlett, MD. Pediatric infectious disease specialist at the University of Chicago Medicine Comer Children's Hospital

"While the overall volumes of respiratory virus patients are lower than they were at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, our hospitals and staff are still stretched thin. The combination of these three respiratory viruses, as well as the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, has created a perfect storm for our healthcare system." said Raed Dweik, MD. Chair of the Respiratory Institute at Cleveland Clinic...Read more

What will happen if the healthcare system will collapse?