Page 32 - BusinessWest January 9, 2023

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Riding Out a ‘Tripledemic’
Doctors Urge Caution in a Season of Flu, RSV, and COVID
BY JOSEPH BEDNAR
[email protected]
wo years ago, flu took a vacation.
Dr. Mark Kenton remembers those days
— but they were no vacation for emergency doctors, who had dealt with almost a year of COVID-19 and the hospitalizations and
deaths that it caused, with vaccines just beginning to emerge.
But influenza, and respiratory syncytial virus, also known as RSV? There was almost none to be found, mainly because masking and isolating had become the norm, cutting off the potential for spreading these com- mon viruses.
“With COVID, we had people masking, home from school, and we had no flu; there was no RSV,” said Ken- ton, chief of Emergency Medicine at Mercy Medical Cen- ter in Springfield. “In fact, Mercy didn’t have one ICU case of flu. Then, when we started to normalize, these
viruses made their way back.”
So much that the prevalence of flu and RSV this year,
combined with a still-lingering COVID threat — albeit one that has been muted by vaccinations — has combined for what has been called a ‘tripledemic’ this winter.
“It seems like the RSV population this year is much larger than in the past, which complicates things,” Ken- ton said. “We’re definitely seeing a lot of influenza, even in patients who have been vaccinated, and we’ve actually been seeing a lot of pneumonia. There are a lot of respi- ratory complaints this time of year, because it spreads through schools with kids at the end of the term, and par- ents may not want to keep the kids home.”
Because COVID still has a presence, he explained, when somebody comes in with a respiratory complaint, they’re tested for that as well as for influenza and RSV, a
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Tripledemic
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