Kansas City 'Tripledemic' Scare Threatens To Bring Back Masks & Fear Of Collapse

This is an interesting report for a lot of reasons but mostly because it features a local health pro offering good advice about home testing and urgent care given FEAR of plague still confronting a great many locals.

Here's the word . . .

Almost 1,100 people came into Saint Luke's emergency rooms during Thanksgiving week for flu and respiratory symptoms.

Larsen pulled up a line graph that charted six years of flu in Saint Luke's Health System patients. in 2016, the most flu patients the health system saw in a week was 191. In 2021, with masking during the COVID-19 pandemic, the health system did not see a single flu case for all of the November to February flu season.

"We see a lot of people come in just because they need a test," Dr. Marc Larsen said. "And we can have people waiting for six to eight hours in the emergency department — people just waiting for testing."

Larsen, who is an emergency department physician, said he doesn't want those extra people to impede the care of the other patients.

"It's not just respiratory viruses we're seeing right now," he said. "It's all the other things. It's heart attacks, it's strokes, and traumas, and falls, and abdominal pains. And those are the things are typically used to seeing them. But when you're seeing those volumes of additional 900 or 1,000 patients a week being tested for a respiratory virus, you can see how easily, and how fragile, that system can collapse."


Read more via www.TonysKansasCity.com link . . .

Kansas City-area hospitals warn they are overwhelmed

Kansas City-area hospitals are warning that they are overwhelmed.Families said they have waited as long as 10 hours at emergency rooms to be seen. And it's not something localized to Kansas City.

Related reading . . .

Health experts in conundrum over best way to avoid winter 'tripledemic'

Dr Jason Newland, a pediatric infectious disease doctor at St Louis children's hospital, is just waiting for his cold to start. "I can list off about 10 people right now that have had some sort of illness in the past five days," Newland said.


Face masks may return amid holiday 'tripledemic' of covid, flu and RSV

With three highly contagious respiratory viruses sickening adults and children around the country and holiday gatherings just weeks away, public health officials are beginning to talk about face masks again. While mask mandates are unlikely in most parts of the country, health experts are renewing recommendations to wear a high-quality medical mask on public transportation, in airports and on planes, while shopping and in other crowded public spaces.

Developing . . .

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