by Michael Snyder, The Economic Collapse Blog:
Winter hasn’t even begun yet, but cold weather diseases are already spreading like wildfire all over the United States. The flu has returned in 2022 with a vengeance, new strains of COVID are reportedly starting to emerge, and RSV has hit some areas of the nation extremely hard. I don’t ever remember seeing anything quite like this, and the weather is only going to get colder in the weeks ahead. Normally, most people would be able to fight off such diseases fairly easily, but at this point so many have weakened immune systems after everything that has transpired over the last few years. As a result, millions of Americans have been getting really sick, and CNN is reporting that U.S. hospitals “are more full than they’ve been throughout the Covid-19 pandemic”…
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Hospitals are more full than they’ve been throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, according to a CNN analysis of data from the US Department of Health and Human Services. But as respiratory virus season surges across the US, it’s much more than Covid that’s filling beds this year.
More than 80% of hospital beds are in use nationwide, jumping 8 percentage points in the past two weeks.
Please take the time to read those two paragraphs again.
At no point during the past several years have our hospitals ever been as full as they are right now.
And this has happened even though the proportion of COVID patients in our hospitals has been steadily shrinking…
Back in January, about a quarter of hospital beds were in use for Covid-19 patients. But now, only about 6% of beds are in use for Covid-19 patients, according to the HHS data.
We are being told that some of the new strains of COVID that are now emerging represent a potent threat, but obviously it isn’t COVID that is causing the massive surge in hospitalizations that we are currently witnessing.
Instead, confirmed cases of the flu are absolutely exploding right now. For example, just check out what is going on in Massachusetts…
Illnesses caused by the flu are surging in Massachusetts, according to the latest weekly report from the Department of Public Health.
The report issued Friday, which covers the week from Nov. 27 through Dec. 3, included 5,462 cases that were confirmed by laboratory testing. That’s nearly double the 2,846 cases confirmed during the week covered by the previous report.
Sadly, we are seeing similar numbers nationwide.
In fact, the number of Americans admitted to the hospital with the flu roughly doubled during Thanksgiving week…
The number of people admitted to the hospital for flu during the week of Thanksgiving was nearly double the number of admissions during the week before. And the latest surveillance data probably does not reflect the full effects of holiday gatherings, as it captures only through November 26, two days past Thanksgiving.
Meanwhile, RSV continues to rip across America at a breathtaking pace, and very young children are being hit particularly hard.
In some cases, hospitals are actually transferring sick kids out of state because they are so overloaded with patients…
To cope with the flood of young patients sickened by a sweeping convergence of nasty bugs — especially respiratory syncytial virus, influenza, and coronavirus — medical centers nationwide have deployed triage tents, delayed elective surgeries, and transferred critically ill children out of state.
Unfortunately, it appears that this is just the beginning.
Winter will officially start later this month, and so it is likely that things will only get worse in the months ahead.
That is not good news at all, because we are already facing significant shortages of key antibiotics all over the country…
“We are so busy we can’t keep up with the phone calls and sick kids,” said Dr. Josie Stone, a pediatrician with Advanced Pediatrics of Boca Raton. While most of the respiratory illnesses Stone sees are viral, children often get complications such as ear, sinus and throat infections that require antibiotics, she said. With children all over the country suffering from the same complications, South Florida pharmacies have a limited supply of many of the most common antibiotics.
The antibiotics in short supply include Amoxicillin and Augmentin to treat ear and skin infections as well as Azithromycin (referred to as a zpack) used to treat certain bacterial infections, such as bronchitis and pneumonia. It also includes medications such as Albuterol to treat asthma or breathing problems.
As I recently covered in another article, the official FDA website says that more than 100 prescription drugs are in short supply right now.
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