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Chicago-area doctors are pleading with parents not to bring their children to hospital emergency rooms unless necessary, saying an unusual increase in respiratory illness is flooding children’s emergency rooms and causing long wait times. waiting.
Comer Children’s Hospital at the University of Chicago Medicine is seeing 79% more patients in its emergency rooms compared to the same period two years ago, said Chief Medical Officer Dr John Cunningham. This has led to emergency room wait times of up to four or five hours for children with less severe problems, after their triage, he said. All patients are screened upon arrival at hospital emergency rooms to determine who should be given priority for care.
Emergency wait times at Lurie Children’s Hospital have increased by around 300%, said Dr Elizabeth Alpern, division chief of emergency medicine. Lurie sees about 80% more children in her ER this season compared to the same time last year, and about 25% more than in previous years, she said.
Advocate Children’s Hospital, which has two campuses with emergencies, receives the most emergency room patients it has ever seen during August and September, said Chief Medical Officer Dr Frank Belmonte . Wait times for children with non-serious conditions are now often two to six hours, he said.
Much of the increase in the number of children going to emergency rooms is due to an unusual spike in respiratory illnesses other than COVID-19, doctors say. Although some children have cases of COVID-19 severe enough to go to hospital, Chicago now averages only one COVID-19 hospital admission per day for those under the age of 18, said Dr. Allison Arwady, Commissioner of the Chicago Department of Public Health.
Additionally, in the midst of this latest wave of COVID-19, some parents may bring children with only mild to moderate symptoms because they fear they have COVID-19, or they want COVID-19 testing to have their children tested. children can go back to school, doctors say.
“We see a lot of children with non-life-threatening respiratory illnesses coming to the emergency room, and we recommend that many of those with mild viral symptoms should be seen by their pediatricians or seen in an emergency care situation. ’emergency,’ Cunningham said.
Normally, many children contract respiratory illnesses such as respiratory syncytial virus, known as RSV, during the winter. But this year, RSV struck early. Doctors say this is likely due to the fact that many children were isolated at home last winter and only been exposed to the disease in recent months, when they started returning to daycare, in socialize and go back to school.
“We anticipate it will actually get more serious as we move into the winter months,” Cunningham said.
A nationwide shortage of nurses is making matters worse, Alpern said.
“It overloads the health care system and it is (which makes) difficult for us to be able to see these patients who really have illnesses that need urgent care,” she said.
If the state is having a bad flu season or another variant of COVID-19 sets in, “it’s going to be really hard to deal with” for hospitals, Belmonte said.
City and state health officials as well as those of a half-dozen Chicago-area hospital systems are urging parents to take children to their pediatrician or emergency care centers if their symptoms are not severe. Parents should start by calling their pediatricians, who often have answering services who can ask questions after hours, they say.
Parents looking for COVID-19 tests should not go to hospital emergency rooms, they say. Many emergency care centers offer testing, as do pharmacies and healthcare systems.
Information about COVID-19 testing sites in Illinois and Chicago is available online.
That doesn’t mean, however, that all parents should avoid emergencies.
Children should be taken to the emergency room if they experience severe chest pain, difficulty breathing, fainting, coughing up blood, severe asthma attacks, severe dehydration, severe allergic reactions, serious injury, changes in mental health, seizures, high fevers with headache and stiff neck or sudden changes in the ability to walk, speak, see or move. Parents should also bring babies 2 months or younger with temperatures of 100.4 degrees or higher.
If a child does not respond or has a life-threatening emergency, parents should call 911.
Arwady, with the Chicago Department of Public Health, is hoping that as rapid COVID-19 testing becomes more accessible, fewer parents will visit the emergency room for COVID-19 testing. Rapid home tests are now in high demand and sometimes can be hard to find in stores. President Joe Biden announced earlier this month a plan to spend $ 2 billion to purchase 300 million rapid COVID-19 tests to distribute to community health centers, food banks and schools. It also announced plans to increase production of rapid tests and said retailers such as Walmart, Amazon and Kroger will sell them at a discount.
Not all schools or daycares accept results from rapid home antigen tests, which are not as sensitive as molecular tests, such as PCR tests. But Arwady said rapid antigen testing can at least give parents some peace of mind.
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