“Our inpatient and outpatient capacity has been stretched to the max, especially our nursing capacity,” said Dr. Mary Ottolini, George W. Hallett Chair of Pediatrics at The Barbara Bush Children’s Hospital at Maine Medical Center in Portland. Respiratory syncytial virus is common in children and appears every year alongside the common cold. RSV has similar symptoms in most cases to the common cold. In some cases in infants, toddlers and older children, symptoms may be more severe. Last week, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention detected an increase in RSV-related emergency room visits across the U.S., with some areas “approaching peak seasonal levels,” according to the CDC website. Ottolini said Friday that the children’s hospital saw more than double the number of patients in October 2022 than the hospital sees this month in a typical year and has seen a record number of RSV patients. Dr. Dora Anne Mills, chief of health improvement at MaineHealth, said that of the 87 pediatric beds at Maine Medical Center, all are full, most with RSV patients, and some patients board the center’s emergency room while waiting for beds. . At Northern Light’s Eastern Maine Medical Center in Bangor, there are 59 pediatric beds, with staff available for only 37 and, according to Dr. Jonathan Wood, a pediatric intensivist at the center, “they’re almost full.” Wood said RSV usually peaks in mid-January, when hospitals would expect to see such high numbers, and he could not say whether the increase now means the number of RSV cases will drop by mid-winter or will still be worse. “I think the way we approach this is prepare for the worst and hope for the best,” he said. Mills said she believed the increase now is because the overwhelming presence of COVID-19 is more prevalent. “We didn’t see other viruses, other respiratory viruses nearly as much in the last two and a half to three years, so it seemed like the COVID virus was kind of crowding out the other viruses,” he said. White House Response Coordinator for COVID-19, Dr. Ashish Jha, told Spectrum News last week that vaccinations against COVID and flu will help reduce the burden on hospitals this winter, and on Friday Dr. emphasized the value of vaccinations. “We can’t have a problem where we see so many flu and COVID patients being admitted to our hospitals that we can’t take care of our most vulnerable children who are infected with RSV or other respiratory viruses,” he said. “We need to keep our emergency rooms open and we need to keep hospital beds open for those in need.”
