In the past month, children’s hospitals across the United States have experienced an unprecedented crisis. They have been overwhelmed with babies and young children being hospitalized for a host of respiratory illnesses, well before the normal peak in December. The most common cause of hospitalization is currently respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), but rhinovirus, enterovirus, adenovirus, influenza, and COVID-19 are also implicated. Children are reported to be infected with several of these viruses simultaneously.
Across the country, pediatric hospitals have reached or exceeded capacity, with three-quarters of all pediatric hospital beds in the United States now occupied. Entire states are at the limit of their capacity, such as Rhode Island (99 percent of all beds occupied), Texas (91 percent) or Missouri (89 percent).
Seattle Children’s Hospital reports that its emergency room is at 200 percent capacity. At Rady Children’s Hospital in San Diego, the largest in California, the number of emergency room visits has doubled in recent days, as has the wait time, which can last up to six hours. Other major cities are experiencing bed and staff shortages in children’s hospitals, including Chicago, New York, New Orleans, Detroit, Washington, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Austin. Many families have to drive for hours or fly to other states when their local children’s hospital reaches capacity.
At the Connecticut Children’s Medical Center in Hartford, Connecticut, plans are being made to have the National Guard and FEMA (American Emergency Management Association) set up a tent on the hospital lawn to handle the influx of children with RSV. Catherine Morgan, a mother from nearby Meriden whose two-month-old son Grant has just been admitted to hospital with RSV, told local media: ‘Once inside we saw stretchers in all the corridors with families waiting for a room”.
Speaking about the terrifying course of her son’s illness, Morgan said: ‘It’s very scary. Respiratory distress is of great concern. He has such small lungs and can’t really breathe… In four hours he was using his whole body to breathe. I have tears in my eyes thinking about it.”
Across the country, thousands of children experience the trauma of hospitalization, which studies have shown can have long-lasting repercussions. Their parents and caregivers sit nervously next to them, holding their children in their arms, or they are turned away from understaffed hospitals.
The only mass hospitalization of children comparable in size took place last January when the Omicron variant, believed to be “benign”, sent an average of 914 children to hospital per day and killed more than 200 during that single month.
Experts warn that over the next few weeks, expected outbreaks of the flu and COVID-19 – for which most children are unvaccinated – will pose a “triple threat” that will put great strain on children’s hospitals.
RSV is a seasonal virus that can cause pneumonia and bronchiolitis in young children, severely affecting their ability to breathe and potentially life-threatening. Historically, it has caused an average of 58,000 hospitalizations and up to 500 deaths per year in children under 5, as well as 177,000 hospitalizations and 14,000 deaths per year in adults 65 and older. Collectively, respiratory pathogens are among the world’s worst killers. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that they cause the highest burden of disease worldwide, measured in years lost to death or disability.
Almost everything the media writes on the subject seeks to blame the current crisis on the mitigation measures put in place in 2020 to limit the spread of COVID-19, such as confinement, masking, distance learning and distancing. society, which have accumulated a so-called ‘immune debt’ in babies who have not been exposed to RSV and other viruses. This unscientific term is a red herring intended to clear those who bear political responsibility for the current disaster.
In reality, the upsurge in these respiratory viruses is a direct result of the “COVID forever” policy currently being pursued by the Biden administration and state governments. They have in the past year, systematically dismantled all COVID mitigation measures. Unlike 2020 and 2021, this school year began with the lifting of mask wearing in all major school districts across the United States, allowing all respiratory pathogens to spread unchecked among more than 50 million children. Most were immunologically naive to many respiratory viruses, due to masking and social distancing. Despite numerous warnings, nothing has been done to prepare for the current wave.
Immunologist Anthony Leonardi, who has always spoken out against the policy of “herd immunity” to COVID-19 which has led to the mass infection of children, recently wrote about the concept of “immune debt”: “We do not We must not delude ourselves into thinking that infections actually offer a benefit or that they are a debt that must be paid. They are more like a tax that we make children pay because our civilization is not developed enough to prevent viral diseases that hospitalize thousands of children a year”.
Dr. Leonardi also drew attention to the growing body of research showing that COVID-19 can cause significant damage to the immune system.
According to the CDC’s latest estimates, 86.3 percent of the U.S. child population has likely been infected with COVID-19 at least once. Even if only a tiny fraction of these 62 million children now have a damaged immune system, it is very likely that this contributes to the current increase in the number of children hospitalized. Many professionals have noticed that healthy children who would not normally suffer from serious illnesses are still hospitalized with RSV and other viruses.
During the winter of 2020-2021, RSV, influenza and most other respiratory pathogens were virtually eliminated in many countries, a remarkable but unintended byproduct of limited masking and social distancing then in place. That winter, only one child died of influenza in the United States, and this week in 2020 there were only 10 confirmed RSV infections, compared to more than 7,000 infections last week.
One of the biggest scientific breakthroughs during the pandemic was the early recognition that SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, is transmitted almost entirely by tiny aerosols, emitted when people talk, sing or even just breathe, and can stay in the air for hours. Evidence that SARS-CoV-2 is airborne has prompted further research into other pathogens, including RSV, which was shown as early as 2016 to be airborne.
In a rational society, this scientific knowledge would have prompted the largest global infrastructure renovation in history, to retrofit buildings with high-quality air filtration and ventilation systems. Instead, nearly every government and health agency around the world has suppressed and distorted science, especially the World Health Organization (WHO) and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Basically, the science of airborne transmission shifts the blame for viral transmission from the individual to society, requiring governments to clean the air in all public spaces. But in capitalism, even this minimal encroachment on private profit is unacceptable.
In a remarkable press conference on Wednesday, Dr. Ashish Jha, the White House COVID Response Coordinator, said COVID-19 “is purely airborne.” This is the most open admission of airborne transmission by a White House official. He then falsely contrasted COVID-19 and RSV and suggested that the latter could be stemmed just by washing hands and “keeping sick children at home,” which is impossible for most working-class families. When asked by a reporter if parents should give their children face masks to protect against RSV and other respiratory illnesses, Dr. Jha objected.
The same processes are taking place on a global scale. In Ontario, Canada, where all COVID-19 mitigation measures have been abandoned, children’s hospitals are also inundated with cases of RSV and other respiratory pathogens, while teachers are not even allowed anymore to report probable COVID-19 infections in their classrooms.
The COVID-19 pandemic has shown that capitalism is totally hostile to the principles of public health. Studies prove that SARS-CoV-2, RSV, influenza and many other pathogens can be eliminated worldwide through massive expansion of testing, modernization of contact tracing, access to health care, infrastructure renovation, compensated temporary confinements, etc.
It is the capitalist class that imposes the “infection tax” on children and on society as a whole. For her, the working class is nothing but flesh to be exploited and “unproductive” lives should be shortened as much as possible.
Through their policies, the capitalists have almost destroyed health systems around the world. In the United States alone, an estimated 333,942 healthcare providers left the workforce in 2021. A recent survey found that more than a third of caregivers plan to leave their current roles by the end of of the year. Same process in schools, key centers of viral transmission throughout the pandemic, where there are huge shortages of teachers, in the United States and internationally.
In response to the inflationary crisis precipitated by the interminable pandemic and the outbreak of war in Ukraine, the working class is entering into struggle all over the world. This developing class struggle in the world must become the basis of the fight to stop the pandemic, end the war and massively develop public health and all other social services. Only through the socialist overthrow of existing property relations can humanity rebuild society and guarantee the universal right to a decent and long life, free from poverty and disease.
(Article first published in English on October 28, 2022)