This year’s flu season is placing major strain on area hospitals.
OSF HealthCare, Carle Health, and the Tri-County area's health departments announced Wednesday that emergency rooms and urgent care facilities are “overwhelmed” with respiratory illness.
It’s not an issue confined to the Peoria area, either. OSF Multispeciality Services Chief Nursing Officer Sarah Overton says its consistent with trends seen all around the state.
“Unfortunately, we’ve seen a flood of patients who could probably recover at home, flocking to our emergency rooms and to our urgent care locations,” she said. “So it’s definitely been, I would say the entire state of Illinois, as I look at some of our respiratory surveillance data, it’s showing that we’re seeing this throughout the entire state of Illinois and, honestly, our country.”
There are several different contributing factors to the current spike in demand. Overton says a “residue” left by the COVID-19 pandemic means patients feel a need to know what they’re dealing with when they experience respiratory symptoms.
“There’s not a lot that we do that’s different with regard to if it’s COVID, if it’s influenza, if it’s RSV — if you’re stable, meaning you’re not having respiratory difficulties and your fever is responding to medications and slowly coming down,” said Overton.
There are symptoms which do require a visit to the emergency room. These include difficulty breathing, chest or abdominal pain, seizures, persistent dizziness, or a fever or cough that improves and then comes back worse.
Another possible cause of the increased demand is lagging flu vaccination numbers.
“I can’t stress this enough,” said Monica Hendrickson, Public Health Administrator at the Peoria City/County Health Department. “I know a lot of people have vaccine fatigue from the past few years, but things such as the influenza vaccine are highly effective. If it doesn’t prevent it, it decreases the severity. And that is key to also understand: that you might be sick for a day or two versus being sick for 10 to 14 days.”
This flu season also has a different dominant strain than previous seasons. Hendrickson says influenza A is at a higher level than usual. She describes it as a “tougher” illness than influenza B.
“What we saw with our national partners and our worldwide partners is that this was a higher level influenza A season, and we’re seeing it impact us locally,” said Hendrickson. “Our hospitals are at capacity, you know, they are doing things that they did, or lessons learned during, you know, COVID and the Omicron period.”
Overton said the hospital system has contingencies in place for times like these.
“Unfortunately, this has been overwhelming to the point where we’ve had to have patients either wait in our emergency room, been unable to accept patients that probably need to be transferred to us, just because of that sheer surge of activity,” she said. “So what we’re doing now is monitoring our bed capacity, monitoring our ambulatory capacity, making sure that what we have is appropriate.”
Overton said measures like cancelling administrative meetings and having leadership help with direct patient care are also in effect. It also means prioritizing certain kinds of patient care.
“We’re seeing an impact on other health care services that we need to provide,” she said. “Such as surgeries and, you know, really seeing those critically ill patients coming into our emergency room, or dealing with a broken limb for instance, that could wait now because we’re having to address this surge of activity with respiratory illnesses.”
Both Overton and Hendrickson say a flu season like this one isn’t entirely unheard of, though it does put significant strain on existing medical infrastructure.
According to the Illinois Department of Public Health, nine people have died from respiratory illness so far this season. Five of those deaths are attributed to influenza, with three from RSV and one from a combination of COVID and RSV.
As flu season continues, Hendrickson and Overton advise following similar precautions to those regularly adopted during the Coronavirus Pandemic. Stay home if you’re feeling sick, wash your hands regularly and thoroughly and get vaccinated if you haven’t yet. Overton said it’s never too late to get the flu vaccine.
President's executive orders could impact future virus surveillance efforts
Late last month, President Donald Trump announced his administration’s intention to withdraw from the World Health Organization (WHO) via executive order. Hendrickson says it’s not entirely clear yet what impact leaving the WHO will have on local health departments, but she’s certain they’ll feel the impact.
“The World Health Organization, they played a huge part in COVID to help us understand the variants that we were seeing,” she said. “Because, as you might remember, we were starting to see different types of variants in different pockets of communities.”
Hendrickson said global data was also important in identifying the prevalence of influenza A in this year’s flu season. Without a connection to the World Health Organization, she’s concerned more responsibility for data collection and analysis will fall on the limited resources of local health departments.
“The challenge is the timeliness of it, and even the burden of where that falls in,” Hendrickson said. “You know, a local health department doesn’t necessarily have that research capacity or that coordination at a global level to make those partnerships and understand that data.”
There's also pre-COVID examples of the World Health Organization's use in a global medical emergency. Data about the Zika virus, a disease carried by mosquitoes and particularly dangerous to pregnant women, was gathered globally and distributed through the World Health Organization.
"A lot of the research we learn about vector diseases, especially mosquito-driven ones, is from our world partners and what they have experienced and lived through," said Hendrickson. "Where they've researched it over time and have developed best practices that we can implement, we get that shared knowledge from them."
Hendrickson said the World Health Organization is unique as a peer-reviewed, data driven and easily accessible global resource, where medical experts can receive guidance from top minds around the world.
“In an era where we have so much globalization, where you can get on the flight here in Peoria and travel to different parts of the world, it’s important to realize that our illnesses can spread easily as well,” she said.
