After the early flu season has begun to put strong pressure on local emergency departments, patient care in California has started to sometimes spill into parking lots.
Unsure if the season is peaking early or will be sustained through winter, healthcare professionals in several Southern California hospitals have begun setting up overflow tents outside emergency rooms to cope with a rising number of patients with flu and other respiratory illnesses.
To handle an increase in respiratory illness, overflow tents were put up at Scripps Memorial Hospital in Encinitas, Jacobs Medical Center at UC San Diego Health in La Jolla, and Sharp Grossmont Hospital in La Mesa.
Since Sept. 1, Scripps hospitals and doctor’s offices reported 1,695 positive flu tests which are more than triple the number during the same time period one year ago, when there were 471 flu cases.
San Diego County’s weekly respiratory illness report shows that the percentage of emergency room patients who had flu symptoms has risen last week to about 9 percent from 7 percent two weeks ago, plus an increase in patients with COVID-19 symptoms was also flagged, though not as quickly.
Dr. Ghazala Sharieff, Scripps Health’s chief medical officer of acute care operations and clinical excellence, emphasized the fear among patients that once they’ve been through the flu, they could still get hit by COVID or some other virus since the fear is that everything is just sort of bouncing off everything else.
Health experts are still not sure whether flu cases would reach an earlier-than-usual peak in California, or they’ll have a prolonged flu season, but Sharieff underscored that it’s going to be this way through February since, generally, the flu hits hardest from late December through February.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said earlier this month that more flu and similar viral illnesses cases are being reported than is typically expected at this time, meaning that much of the US is seeing a fast start to the flu season, with cases being notably high in Georgia, New York City, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Washington, DC.
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