Medical Groups Ask Biden Administration to Declare Emergency Over RSV Virus Surge Among Children

Health care workers are seen in a recent file photo. (Ariana Drehsler/AFP via Getty Images)

The American Academy of Pediatrics and the Children’s Hospital Association called on the federal government to declare an emergency due to an increase in pediatric respiratory illnesses like influenza and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV).

The heads of the Children’s Hospital Association (CHA) and American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) called (pdf) on President Joe Biden and Department of Health Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra “to declare an emergency to support the national response to the alarming surge of pediatric hospitalizations due to pediatric respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) and influenza along with the continuing children’s mental health emergency.”

Without providing specific data, they added that the pediatric hospitals “are being asked to support more care and higher levels of care than ever before.”

Similar warnings about few hospital beds were issued during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020. Hospital beds were deployed to New York City and Los Angeles, which were reportedly barely used to treat COVID-19 patients.

An emergency declaration would give some hospitals more leeway in freeing up bed capacity, said the letter. Biden should issue an emergency under the Stafford Act or the National Emergencies Act, the two CEOs wrote.

“We need emergency funding support and flexibilities along the same lines of what was provided to respond to COVID surges,” they wrote.

RSV is described as a common respiratory illness that generally causes mild, cold-like symptoms, the CDC says on its website. RSV can lead to more serious complications among very young children or the elderly, the agency says.

About 58,000 to 80,000 children under the age of 5 are hospitalized each year across the United States with RSV, according to the CDC. About 500 U.S. deaths from the virus are reported each year.

In New York City, for example, one top pediatric doctor said that emergency rooms are having difficulty handling RSV cases.

“It’s at the highest levels any of us have ever seen,” Dr. James Schneider, the chief of the pediatric intensive care unit at Long Island Jewish Hospital in Queens, told the New York Post earlier this week. “We’re caring for more kids than we have beds for.”

Schneider suggested that COVID-19-related behaviors and rules have led to an uptick in RSV infections.

“Over the past couple of years, we instituted restrictions on our behavior [because of the pandemic]—masking, social distancing, school closures,” he said. “There was very little transmission of these easily transmissible respiratory viruses,“ he said, adding, “There’s not as much immunity in the community” to RSV.