U.S. Covid winters are making long hospital waits the new normal

Winter has traditionally been crunchtime for hospitals because of influenza and another seasonal pathogen, respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV. Now SARS-CoV-2 has joined them to form an unholy trinity of pathogens that surge in the cold months.

White House covid-19 response coordinator Ashish Jha said the American health-care system may not be able to withstand the continued viral onslaught, straining the system’s ability to care for other serious illnesses.

“I am worried that we are going to have, for years, our health system being pretty dysfunctional, not being able to take care of heart attack patients, not being able to take care of cancer patients, not being able to take care of the kid who’s got appendicitis because we’re going to be so overwhelmed with respiratory viruses for … three or four months a year,” Jha told The Washington Post.

He described a scenario in which the typical winter logjam of patients begins much earlier than usual — in August or September — because of the coronavirus. It’s a darker scenario than the administration has portrayed in the past, and one Jha said most Americans have yet to realize.

“I just think people have not appreciated the chronic cost, because we have seen this as an acute problem,” Jha said. “We have no idea how hard this is going to make life for everybody, for long periods of time.”

James Jarvis, a senior executive at Bangor-based Northern Light Health, the second-largest health system in Maine, shares Jha’s concerns. He said hospitals now expect to see patients who are sicker, including people with long covid, children more at risk for diabetes because of covid-19 infections and patients suffering from heart conditions related to previous bouts of the disease.

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These warnings come at a moment when public health officials are still waiting to see how bad the current winter surge in viral infections turns out to be. So far, this covid winter in the United States has been challenging, though not nearly as disastrous as the past two. But much of the winter still lies ahead. While covid-19 hospitalizations rose significantly between October and the end of December, hospitalizations in recent days have fallen, with about 35,000 inpatients suffering from covid-19 as of Tuesday. The national numbers can mask geographical surges: States along the East Coast have been hit hardest so far, while the West has been largely spared.

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