For the second year in a row, the UPMC Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh has erected a tent in its ambulance bay to care for surging numbers of kids coming in with respiratory illnesses.
The hospital said in a video on Twitter that the tent adds up to 10 beds to the department. “This tent is well equipped and fully staffed, enabling us to further streamline our process as we assess the needs of our patients.”
Like last fall, the temporary addition comes due to longer ER wait times, which have recently exceeded eight hours. The need for additional space is mostly caused by young patients seeking treatment for Respiratory Syncytial Virus, or RSV. It usually results in a simple cold but sometimes turns into pneumonia or bronchiolitis. The former is inflammation of the air sacs, and the latter is congestion and inflammation of the small airways.
Though cases spike every year, data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show that people are getting RSV much earlier this season, and levels are high. Infectious disease experts believe this trend is the result of a so-called immunity gap.
Masking and physical distancing that people undertook to protect from COVID-19 resulted in many kids not being exposed to RSV and other respiratory viruses. Now that those measures have been relaxed, transmission is surging among children who up to now had limited exposure.
