How was it compared to previous years? There have been nightmare stories every flu season: Overcrowded hospitals, flu patients having to wait in the corridor, queues of ambulances in front of the clinic, health care system collapsing .. I have been hearing stories like this every year.
How was it compared to previous years? There have been nightmare stories every flu season: Overcrowded hospitals, flu patients having to wait in the corridor, queues of ambulances in front of the clinic, health care system collapsing .. I have been hearing stories like this every year.
Like night and day. We have never been faced with lack of beds like this for flu. My floor became the med-surg covid floor and they installed a curtain so they could put a second bed in all of our rooms. My floor is supposed to be primarily surgery and I stopped floating on my regular days to other units a few years back but we have never had so many flu patients occupying beds. The last year I floated during a flu season I would have 2 out of 4 or 5 patients with the flu. (That was also the year I realized the flu vaxxed were ill with one of the strains that was also in their vaccine.) Keep in mind that most surgeries were cancelled during the covid surge so more beds were available for covid and they got filled. We have always had a wide variety of inpatient diagnoses during flu season. There are always periods when the ER had to turn away ambulances and beds may be short but it has never been primarily because of the flu. And from what I have been seeing we will continue being busy with mostly non-covid/flu, though the number had started to tick up last week with covid. ER waits have been bad as well as urgent care, but it doesn't appear to be the flu. And as we all know the media is doing their part to scare people into getting their flu vaccine and they have been doing it for years. The CDC has been putting out scare numbers of flu deaths for years which are based on estimates, not actual confirmed flu cases.
How was it compared to previous years? There have been nightmare stories every flu season: Overcrowded hospitals, flu patients having to wait in the corridor, queues of ambulances in front of the clinic, health care system collapsing .. I have been hearing stories like this every year.
Like night and day. We have never been faced with lack of beds like this for flu. My floor became the med-surg covid floor and they installed a curtain so they could put a second bed in all of our rooms. My floor is supposed to be primarily surgery and I stopped floating on my regular days to other units a few years back but we have never had so many flu patients occupying beds. The last year I floated during a flu season I would have 2 out of 4 or 5 patients with the flu. (That was also the year I realized the flu vaxxed were ill with one of the strains that was also in their vaccine.) Keep in mind that most surgeries were cancelled during the covid surge so more beds were available for covid and they got filled. We have always had a wide variety of inpatient diagnoses during flu season. There are always periods when the ER had to turn away ambulances and beds may be short but it has never been primarily because of the flu. And from what I have been seeing we will continue being busy with mostly non-covid/flu, though the number had started to tick up last week with covid. ER waits have been bad as well as urgent care, but it doesn't appear to be the flu. And as we all know the media is doing their part to scare people into getting their flu vaccine and they have been doing it for years. The CDC has been putting out scare numbers of flu deaths for years which are based on estimates, not actual confirmed flu cases.