Day 985: The Cold Pandemic

Despise surprisingly low rates of toddler vaccination and adult boosting against COVID (under 5% each), the pandemic of the moment appears to be the common cold:

Sick kids are crowding emergency rooms in various parts of the country, and some pediatric hospitals say they are running out of beds. But this uptick in illness has largely been due to viruses other than the coronavirus, like RSV, enteroviruses and rhinovirus.

While respiratory infections typically surge in the winter months, experts say that this year the season has started much sooner, and that numbers are unusually high.

"Rates are as high as 25% of those [who have] tested positive for RSV. That is quite unusual for October, we would typically start to see higher rates in November, December and January," said Dr. Ibukun Kalu, a specialist in pediatric infectious diseases at Duke Children's Hospital in Durham, North Carolina.

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For now, the issue is concentrated among younger patients. But Kalu said that with the colder months coming up, it could begin to impact more people.

"As we see more viral infections in kids, we will see a similar pattern in adults," she said.