Community News
Readers; Stay Alert! We are witnessing an unprecedented explosion of respiratory syncytial virus
BY SIMONE J. SMITH
“Last week our owner and I found out that one of our team members unfortunately and tragically lost his son to RSV,” said Ellen Bloom of Offshore Spars.
This dismal report came out the week of November 8th, 2022. A Metro Detroit company worked to support a family who lost their child to RSV. The 6-year-old from Macomb County recently died from a common respiratory illness, which is surging in Michigan.
Readers; stay alert! We are witnessing an unprecedented explosion of Respiratory Syncytial Virus (RSV) all over the United States right now, and it is making its way over here. RSV is the leading cause of both bronchiolitis and pneumonia in children under the age of one in this country, and globally we normally see somewhere between 100,000 and 200,000 babies die from the virus each year.
For some reason this year RSV is spreading like wildfire and hospitals are rapidly filling up. According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 77% of all paediatric hospital beds in the U.S. are currently occupied. That is an extremely high figure.
Normally, RSV kills approximately 14,000 adults over the age of 65 in the United States each year, but that number could potentially be far higher this year, because so many people have compromised immune systems; some scientists have tied this to the injections and boosters that were touted to our global citizens. Yes, you know that injection they made you take for one strain of coronavirus; the one that will not help with any of the other ones. I am going to pause for dramatic effect right now…
Moving on.
The 9 Most Common RSV Symptoms in Adults are:
- Fever
- Congestion
- Cough
- Wheezing
- Rapid Heart rate
- Bluing Skin
- Tiredness
- Irritability
- Headache
Normally, about one out of every 50 infants in the U.S. would catch RSV during the first year of life, but it appears that number could be far higher this time around.
Why does this virus hit infants particularly hard?
Babies are born with the tiniest of airways. Viruses like RSV inflame those airways, making it difficult to breathe. The smaller the airway, the less inflammation it takes to close it off
It is probably why there are reports that capacity at paediatric hospitals across Michigan is strained as a record number of severely ill children with respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV, flood emergency rooms and fill hospital beds.
“There is not a hospital in Michigan that takes care of paediatric patients that has not told us that they are feeling stress right now, immense stress,” Dr. Natasha Bagdasarian, Michigan’s chief medical executive, told the Free Press .
Officials in Michigan are even saying that they have never seen anything like this before.
In fact, one official is publicly admitting that her hospital is now “100% full” because the RSV outbreak in her local area has become so severe…
“We have never seen a surge in paediatric respiratory viruses like this before,” said Luanne Thomas Ewald, Chief Operating Officer at Mott and Von Voigtlander Women’s Hospital, in a statement. “Our hospital is 100% full.”
This spread is not only happening in Michigan; RSV is overwhelming other states as well, for example, just check out what is going on in Colorado…
The number of children being hospitalized in Colorado with viruses like the flu and RSV is unprecedented as the season for respiratory illnesses gets underway earlier than usual and more severe.
“It’s nothing like we’ve seen before,” said Dr. Kevin Carney, associate chief medical officer with Children’s Hospital Colorado.
When Colorado health officials recently held a briefing for members of the press, they showed them a graph of RSV cases that were “Going up almost vertically.”
What a tragedy.
If there is a major RSV outbreak in your area, you will want to closely monitor members of your family that fall into either of those two groups.
Unfortunately, it won’t be too long before the rates in Canada are on the rise, and it does make me wonder; why is this happening? What could possibly be the cause? I have some suspicions, but we will follow up on this story and continue to keep you posted with factual, scientific updates.
The numbers will never lie.