Dr. Tom Benzoni is a locally practicing emergency physician.
Now that the elections are over, the headlines are filled with relevant material. You’ve probably heard about the rise in RSV, flu, and COVID-19 cases. they’re real. Blank Children’s Hospital recently had a record 185 visits in one day. Emergency departments in Des Moines and across the country are overwhelmed.
Three viruses now circulating account for much of the misery both in the community and in emergency room waiting areas: RSV, influenza, COVID. In general, these viral diseases are not harmful to most people. On the other hand, if you are not “most people”, these viruses can be quite harmful.
We have been here for the past few years with COVID. It is still here and doing what coronaviruses do, infecting and reinfecting. There were four of them before COVID; now there are five. They will continue to reinfect us. It is our new normal.
RSV is an old friend: respiratory syncytial virus. When you see a child with a runny nose, red eyes, and cough, it’s likely RSV. RSV usually occurs in late fall and winter, when people begin to come together and share their illnesses. Most people get RSV at a young age and have some level of immunity. However, just like COVID, you can get RSV over and over again. Typically, for the healthy adult, this means a few days of runny nose and cough. During that time, you don’t infect other people by doing what we’ve learned to do in the past year and decade, keeping your distance and not sharing germs. That activity will come back to bite us. Keep reading.
The flu is also an old friend. The flu has been around for a long time. This year, we are sharing the H3 flu so far; this can change (Aside from infectious disease doctors, geeks, and virologists, no one cares to name what’s making us miserable. And I can rarely tell them apart, whether it’s the flu or the geeks.) The flu makes you miserable. Your muscles ache and it even hurts to move your eyeballs. The fever can be alarmingly high. It is highly transmissible, particularly by droplets and contact.
That’s very good. If you’re healthy, you’ll probably do fine with any of these. The trick is not to pass them on to people who are already sick, such as the very young, the very old, the infirm, and the immunocompromised. We learned how to do this during COVID. And that’s part of the problem.
Plus:Opinion: How does the COVID-19 pandemic end? History and biology help provide the answer.
While we were protecting others from getting sick with COVID (which Iowans did very well at!), we haven’t had the usual surges of influenza and RSV in the last two or three years. Depending on your point of view, that’s lucky or unlucky. It means that the babies were not exposed to RSV. Adults did not renew their immunity when exposed to RSV and influenza. The elderly and the immunocompromised might well have survived because of this. RSV has not forgotten. It’s coming back sooner and it has a bigger pool of people to infect because it didn’t catch them last year and the year before. Therefore, RSV and influenza are likely to become more prominent in the coming months.
However, not everything is hopeless. These diseases are generally preventable. And, if you do catch them, there are a few things you could do.
PREVENTION: Obviously, prevention is the simplest, cheapest and safest for all three (as with other diseases). Unfortunately, we don’t have good immunization for RSV yet, so you’ll have to take your chances there. In the meantime, you have very good flu shots and very good COVID shots. (I love the English term “jab”). Update them.
INFECTION CONTROL: If you get sick, show the common courtesies that everyone in Iowa knows; do not spread your diseases to others.
MEDICAL CARE: If you feel that you are seriously ill, contact your family doctor. Your family doctor can tell the difference between a viral and a bacterial illness and knows your history and therefore your vulnerability to getting more sick. This is especially true for COVID and influenza.
We have very good antiviral drugs for COVID, very good antiviral drugs for influenza, and almost nothing that will help with RSV. Antibiotics do not help these; these are viral diseases and they make a mockery of bacterial treatment. Your GP, who knows you best, will advise you.
Although I work in an emergency department, there isn’t much the emergency department can offer you for general relief beyond what your mother advised. And given the crowd, chances are you’ll pick something you don’t already have!
So a frequently asked question is when to seek emergency care. The most important thing, again, is to contact your family doctor for advice. “Just go to the ER” is not an appropriate response; don’t accept it. You have the right to better advice from someone with more than 24 years of education. If you have trouble breathing, excessive vomiting (“excessively” is defined differently for everyone, especially men), or chest pain.
We will spend this winter together, as always, walking on the ice and snow hand in hand. Clean hand on clean hand, I’ll add.
Dr. Tom Benzoni is a locally practicing emergency physician.
Source: news.google.com