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The strain on the U.S. healthcare system this winter with several respiratory illnesses circulating is likely to be repeated in the coming years and will put patients with other ailments at risk, a senior White House official told the Washington Post.
“‘I am worried that we are going to have, for years, our health system being pretty dysfunctional, not being able to take care of heart attack patients, not being able to take care of cancer patients, not being able to take care of the kid who’s got appendicitis because we’re going to be so overwhelmed with respiratory viruses for … three or four months a year.’”
U.S. hospitals were hit this winter by a tripledemic of flu, COVID and respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV, which hurt small children in particular by clogging their airways.
Jha said that combination is likely to return in the cold months late this year, or even earlier, because of the coronavirus that causes COVID-19. The virus has morphed into its most transmissible variant yet in the form of XBB.1.5, an omicron subvariant that has become dominant in the U.S., accounting for 43% of new cases in the week through Jan. 14, according to data released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Friday.
And while XBB.1.5 has not proved to be more severe than earlier variants yet, it has a growth advantage and likely higher immunity escape, according to the World Health Organization.
Jha is concerned that Americans have not understood yet the risk posed by a logjam of winter patients.
“I just think people have not appreciated the chronic cost, because we have seen this as an acute problem,” Jha said. “We have no idea how hard this is going to make life for everybody, for long periods of time.”
James Jarvis, a senior executive at Bangor-based Northern Light Health, the second largest health system in Maine, told the Post he is also concerned that hospitals are seeing patients who are sicker than usual.
These include patients suffering from long COVID, children who are at greater risk of diabetes due to COVID infections and patients who have heart issues relating to their infections.
Jarvis highlighted other pressures on the system, including staffing and supply shortages, which are happening with greater frequency.
More than 7,000 nurses at two New York hospitals held a strike this week over staffing and workloads, and others are threatening to follow.
“Delays of care will result in people having either more severe disease or, unfortunately, dying, and there’s little that we can do to prevent that,” Jarvis said. “You know, that has always happened, but never to the extent that it’s happening now.”
Coronavirus Update: MarketWatch’s daily roundup has been curating and reporting all the latest developments every weekday since the coronavirus pandemic began
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