COVID, flu and RSV declining in hospitals

So many patients sick with RSV had inundated Connecticut Children’s Medical Center that they had to be treated in hallways and playrooms. Facing their busiest season in memory last fall, hospital leaders floated a plan to enlist the National Guard to set up tents outside. Doctors braced for a dire winter — a looming disaster some dubbed a “tripledemic” — with flu season revving up, coronavirus roaring back and the holidays providing fuel for viruses to spread.

But no such surge materialized. The RSV wave has receded in Connecticut and across the country. Flu cases have rapidly dwindled. COVID hospitalizations rose briefly after Christmas, only to fall again.

“We are seeing the normal busy, but not the very busy that I thought we would see,” said Juan Salazar, physician in chief at Connecticut Children’s in Hartford. “I’m just so pleased we are now able to be back to normal staffing. Busy staffing, but not anything near to what we saw in the fall.”

It turns out that early waves of respiratory syncytial virus and influenza peaked before the new year, according to new data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And the expected winter uptick of coronavirus is nowhere close to overwhelming hospitals, as it did in 2021 when COVID wards were filled with unvaccinated people struggling to breathe and last winter when the highly transmissible omicron variant ignited a massive wave of illness.

The seven-day average of hospital patients testing positive for coronavirus has declined to 39,000 as of Friday, after peaking at 47,000 around Jan. 10. COVID-19 patients are occupying 5 percent of hospital beds, compared with 21 percent at this point last year, according to CDC data.

Weekly emergency room visits for all three viruses combined peaked in early December — with no post-holiday resurgence, according to a new CDC dashboard. For senior citizens, COVID and flu emergency room visits peaked in late December.

“It’s possible the decline might have been even greater without the mingling in the holidays,” said Barbara Mahon, a CDC official who oversees the response to coronavirus and other respiratory viruses. “Things don’t look as bad as they did a few weeks or a few months ago, but we are still very much in the throes of winter.”