U.S. facing new dire health care normal as COVID compounds winter woes

U.S. facing new dire health care normal as COVID compounds winter woes

Published January 14,2023


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COVID-19 has additional compounded the woes of the U.S. well being care system, which even previous to the pandemic was strained by winter diseases, and dangers imperiling it for years to return, in keeping with a just lately printed report.

Traditionally, the strains on the well being care system in winter come from influenza and different seasonal diseases, together with respiratory syncytial virus. But with the arrival of COVID-19, the viruses have shaped what the Washington Post newspaper referred to as an “unholy trinity of pathogens that surge in the cold months.”

That has led to some hospitals being pressured to place off different life-saving remedies with White House COVID-19 Response Coordinator Ashish Jha telling the Post that the present well being care system might buckle beneath the pressures being offered.

“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 advised the Post.

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

Still, one other official who spoke to the newspaper on situation of anonymity was not fairly so certain that Jha’s evaluation could be borne out.

“It’s not an unreasonable hypothesis,” the official mentioned. “But I don’t think we have hit a steady state of disease to be able to say for sure what we will see year in and year out. … It’s very dynamic.”

“We all agree that the virus is evolving faster than we thought. We just don’t know where the virus is headed. We don’t even know what the next three weeks are going to hold,” added the official.

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