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I Don’t Want My Little Girl to Die on The Floor of a Hospital
December 14, 2022 10:57 PM Subscribe

I Don’t Want My Little Girl to Die on The Floor of a Hospital “I have a daughter. She’s four. Before the pandemic, she had a bad case of RSV. She was having trouble breathing. We took her to a hospital. The staff treated her right away. We were home later that afternoon. Back then, hospitals weren’t full of babies with respiratory viruses. Now they are. Now parents are spending days trying to find a bed. There’s a growing shortage of liquid antibiotics. Moms are calling 18 pharmacies just to get a prescription filled. Doctors are telling us to crush up adult medicine and sprinkle it on their food. I know, it doesn’t look that bad. I understand how easy it is to dismiss everything I just said. When you look out your window, you don’t see toddlers dying on the floors of hospitals. You don’t see packed ERs.

Nobody’s coming to save us.
Every day, I hear more about shortages of children’s antibiotics. I read about empty shelves where medicine should be. I see stories about children dying suddenly from the flu, or strep throat. One morning they’re a little sick. A day later, they’re gone forever.
I read articles about novel viruses infecting children’s tonsils and weakening their immune systems. It leaves them vulnerable to secondary, opportunistic infections.”

As the ‘tripledemic’ rages on, masks can keep you safe this holiday season

posted by Bottlecap (53 comments total) 26 users marked this as a favorite

Ah! Content warning! Move that below the fold, please!
posted by Toddles at 11:15 PM on December 14, 2022

This is by the same author of yesterday's "It's Not Cool to Overreact," which had mixed reception on the blue but I found to be quite a good read.
posted by AlSweigart at 11:49 PM on December 14, 2022 [5 favorites]

We found out our son had RSV on his fourth birthday when his lips were blue and he couldn't breathe (many years ago). Lots of infants and young kids got RSV. Nevertheless you never heard about it because it is mild for most kids and there's nothing they could do to prevent it.

Popular new-parent books at the time, 'What to Expect When You're Expecting' and 'What to Expect the First Year' had many long chapters of things to be afraid of but had barely a mention of RSV. Its resurgence after Covid is what has finally brought it into the public eye.

Antibiotics won't do anything for it--I'm guessing her point with RSV is that there are no hospital beds and secondary infections could happen. Not having a hospital bed with respiratory equipment would have been a big problem with my son because he couldn't breathe.

The issue is that people catching Covid can fill hospitals, leaving no room or medicines for other people in need.

This was a big issue when Covid first hit. We now have vaccines and know that N95 masks work in reducing our chances of getting sick.

But people aren't getting the latest shots and are no longer masking.

Now they can also track Covid rates using waste water (not many people report their home Covid test results, but everyone poops). Here's the results for where I live, and here are results in other parts of California. Maybe your state or town is doing this too. The California data shows that we are in the middle of another Covid surge--one of the biggest in almost two years.

Stay safe everyone--someone's life may depend on it.
posted by eye of newt at 12:23 AM on December 15, 2022 [37 favorites]

The wastewater numbers in Houston are also extremely high. They've been going up since the start of November and are now about 350% of what they were in July 2020. I took a screenshot and posted it to the Houston subreddit, where it was instantly down voted and flooded with people claiming "this is normal" and "yeah people catch the common cold too" and "how many boosters are they expecting us to get?"

I'd say it's just assholes being loud online, but only maybe 1 in 20 people in public wears a mask. And that was true during the last few spikes too. If I walk into a room of twenty people, I'm the only one wearing a mask.
posted by AlSweigart at 2:29 AM on December 15, 2022 [18 favorites]

It's interesting to compare the relative spikes on different region's wastewater plots. For the Boston area, last winter's spike far exceeded anything that had come prior to it by a lot. It was the first "well fuck it" winter where people stopped wearing masks, and even with our relatively high vaccination rates it still created a bigger wastewater spike than anything in 2020 or 2021. And so far it looks like we're on track to do it again! Fun.

Mask usage has at least picked up from where it was a couple weeks ago. I can now count on seeing a few more people wearing masks inside a store than just me.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 5:12 AM on December 15, 2022 [2 favorites]

I got RSV like a month ago and am still getting over the annoying cough. My partner got it from me (probably) and ditto. And yeah we mask up everywhere, even outside. Still do. Masks aren't perfect but they're better than nothing.

That RSV cough, though. It hurts. It's not the throat pain so much as it is the force of the cough. You get light-headed while you're spasming. Sleep is very difficult. Not a fan.
posted by seanmpuckett at 5:15 AM on December 15, 2022 [8 favorites]

I work in healthcare and having been picking up the morning shifts for the After Hours Clinic that the health team I work for provides. It is startling and upsetting how many littles we see for respiratory problems right now. And of course given the dire ER and Peds ICU situation here in Ontario, one little kid had to be sent faraway from a hospital in his area to the one in ours because there are no beds.

I'm used to masking as routine because of my job. And if the idea of so many small children struggling for breath as their parents panic doesn't give you reason for pause about mask-wearing, I don't know what to tell you.
posted by Kitteh at 5:21 AM on December 15, 2022 [15 favorites]

Same here. The post-viral cough is the worst. I probably had RSV a little over a month ago. All I know is that it wasn't covid. Several weeks later I'm not coughing as much as I was, but I still get into coughing fits.

If you haven't already, get checked out for pneumonia. I had an even worse cough for two weeks after the other RSV symptoms cleared. I thought I had slipped into bronchitis, but it ended up being pneumonia. Four days of antibiotics cleared that up and made the cough slightly less worse.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 5:23 AM on December 15, 2022 [2 favorites]

Three days ago (12 December) the Therapeutic Goods Administration [Australian equivalent to the FDA] announced:

"There are currently shortages of some antibiotics in Australia, including amoxicillin, cefalexin and metronidazole.

To help manage the shortage:
- your pharmacist may be able to give you a different brand or a TGA approved overseas alternative
- your doctor can prescribe a different strength or medicine with similar spectrum of activity
- for some antibiotics, your pharmacist may dispense a substitute product without prior approval from your doctor

Visit our website for up-to-date information on the supply situation: https://www.tga.gov.au/safety/shortages/medicine-shortage-alerts/antibiotics-shortages "
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 5:34 AM on December 15, 2022 [5 favorites]

(Please forgive me, I am embarrassed to admit I didn’t realize it was the same author. I am very bad about only paying attention to blog names and not connecting people across sites. It was not purposeful! I just found this piece to be incredibly powerful as so many of us are trying to keep our families safe.)
posted by Bottlecap at 5:41 AM on December 15, 2022 [3 favorites]

Also I feel like this is preaching to the choir, but get your damn flu shot.
posted by seanmpuckett at 5:46 AM on December 15, 2022 [16 favorites]

Don't apologize, Bottlecap, it actually was very helpful to read this, to sort of contextualize yesterday's piece. I'm still thinking about some of the comments from yesterday's thread, people were making some really good points. And this one, of course, is just devastating. It's just...I guess my question remains the same, and it's not even an important question, it's not like knowing the answer would solve anything, but how much of people's individual attitudes are of their own devising, and how much comes instead from encountering a system that cannot and does not care?

One of the things that surprised me most about the pandemic was the lack of leadership, the lack of leading by example, by providing good and actionable information. I pictured, you know, Victory-Garden-level efforts, everyone in the neighborhood sewing masks for people who couldn't get masks. People coming together the way they do after a flood or something. Everybody working together--chaotically, maybe, with all the many frustrating flaws of not-quite-enough coordination, but still, together.

I don't think people are sheep, but I do think we are shaped by the narratives that surround us. And there were some absolutely poisonous narratives in COVID that competed with the basic normal commonsense step of, y'know, putting something between your lungs and someone else's. I'm not sure I'm ready to blame just ordinary normal people for the poison of that narrative, not when we see what an industry sprung up around spreading it. I think--and I'm not, like, dying on this hill or anything, but I do believe it--that ordinary people were victims of that angry, nasty poison. Yes, it all found a receptive audience, but it's not like we're a nation of psychopaths (again, I keep referring back to the US, YMMV). We're really not! But there's a way to make us act like we are.

But there are these repercussions to that, and I don't know how we psychologically/culturally reconcile ourselves to the body count, especially if we continue to see childhood deaths from all these other diseases (and whatever else COVID's impact on our immunity offers). At some point you can't keep blaming Biden, liberals, 5G, Bill Gates, The Medical Community That Suppressed Ivermectin, whatever. Right? That doesn't mean reality breaks through--I think we've seen pretty strong indications that we can easily live through national psychosis, where the things we believe have no contact with reality--but that anger is going to go somewhere else.

Anyway. I was glad to read this essay, and I wouldn't have seen it if it hadn't been posted here.
posted by mittens at 6:00 AM on December 15, 2022 [8 favorites]

All of this is terrifying. I'm due in a week and my in-laws want to fly in and stay for a month to help with the baby. Good! Also terrifying! I trust my mom and my husband's dad to be careful but not my dad or my husband's mom... My husand's mom is an anti-vaxxer type and she'll want to go out to see her friends... me and my husband have been talking about him masking at work, etc etc during this winter surge when the baby has no immune system but suddenly there will be 3x more people around the baby? I really just want to say no.
posted by subdee at 6:07 AM on December 15, 2022 [17 favorites]

I (vaccinated as can be, still masking, etc.) am clearly not the audience for this article, except insofar as I think it's good to be vigilant about the general public health/antibiotics/etc. situation right now. I will add, in case this is helpful to anyone, that I went to the drugstore the other day (central Virginia) for something entirely unrelated to all of this. When I passed the cold/flu aisle, the stock was practically wiped out, as empty as the early days of the pandemic. FYI.
posted by cupcakeninja at 6:07 AM on December 15, 2022 [1 favorite]

I too agonize over that question (and whether the answer matters), mitten. I sometimes think we in the United States might be a nation of psychopaths. Though I see the poisonous messages from both parties and from our "public health" bodies, and I know that the propaganda is working -- see "immunity debt" -- I just don't know what to do with people's refusal to care about others. I have now spent years pleading with friends and family to take the smallest steps to protect others, including my own small child about whom they purport to care, to no avail. These are people who are well educated, who have access to information, who are in some cases Democrats who claim to believe in society. But they won't wear a mask in the grocery store.
posted by Il etait une fois at 6:11 AM on December 15, 2022 [10 favorites]

About a week ago WCVB's evening news gave a teaser along the lines of "RSV, Flu and Covid cases are on the rise; the CDC is asking all Americans to wear masks again, but should you?". I didn't stick around past the commercial break to see if the answer was an unequivocal "YES", so I can only hope it was.

But framing it that way.....were they trying to do some sort of reverse psychology subversion of Betteridge's Law where viewers might be more receptive to requests if they're presented by people who appear skeptical, or was the news team just being irresponsible and undercutting the message for no fucking reason?
posted by RonButNotStupid at 6:29 AM on December 15, 2022 [3 favorites]

My 17 yo medically complex godchild (muscular dystrophy) picked upRSV likely from school-no masks…they’ve been sedated and on a breathing tube for a month, and is facing a tracheostomy this week as the next step toward going home. You may never know who a mask will protect.
posted by childofTethys at 6:30 AM on December 15, 2022 [24 favorites]

I pictured, you know, Victory-Garden-level efforts, everyone in the neighborhood sewing masks for people who couldn't get masks.

Someone that I've never met in person sewed several cloth masks for me in the pandemic's early months, which was not only great for my getting outside, but also a great comfort when I was furloughed from my job and not sure that I'd have a job to come back to.

And there were some absolutely poisonous narratives in COVID that competed with the basic normal commonsense step of, y'know, putting something between your lungs and someone else's. I'm not sure I'm ready to blame just ordinary normal people for the poison of that narrative, not when we see what an industry sprung up around spreading it. I think--and I'm not, like, dying on this hill or anything, but I do believe it--that ordinary people were victims of that angry, nasty poison.

Pretty sure that that didn't exist in WWII, with people not only not putting in Victory Gardens of their own (at least people who could and had the available turf) but bitterly criticizing those who did. There was a lot of opposition to getting involved in the war before the declaration of it in America, not so much after.
posted by Halloween Jack at 6:34 AM on December 15, 2022 [3 favorites]

Pardon for a possible derail: I try not to follow Covid, RSV, etc. news any more closely than I have to, but I missed the earlier thread about "immunity debt." I'd heard it discussed casually but not researched it. I just poked around and found a bunch of casual web articles, but also a couple pieces in the Lancet (one, two) that discuss it as a real thing, in what appears to be a responsible fashion. Any MeFites out there with clinical or research experience who don't buy this?
posted by cupcakeninja at 6:39 AM on December 15, 2022 [1 favorite]

Cupcakeninja, I am definitely not answering as someone with clinical or research experience, but I wanted to point to a thread that I found very interesting as an argument against immunity debt.
posted by mittens at 6:53 AM on December 15, 2022 [4 favorites]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't Sweden tighten up their public health measures in line with other nations by the winter of 2020-21 - in other words, before the RSV/flu season?
posted by saturday_morning at 7:13 AM on December 15, 2022

There is a terrible conflation going on between two ideas of immunity debt: "nobody got RSV or flu for the past 2 years so everyone is getting it now, plus the pathogens are taking advantage of a larger immune-naive pool to produce more virulent strains this year" vs "nobody got exposed to enough viruses for 2 years and this has made their immune systems lazy and bad". The first is a respectable hypothesis that is currently more or less the consensus in the medical community for why we're seeing the current surge, rather than "immunity theft" from prior Covid infection (source: I'm an academic pediatrician). The second is complete nonsense and lines up with common pre-pandemic antivax talking points about why contracting measles, for example, is to be desired as a nice healthy workout for your immune system.

We don't know whether immunity theft is playing a role here -- it's also a respectable hypothesis that's being looked into. Right now, I tell my patients that the evidence favours the immunity debt explanation (type 1 not type 2) rather than immunity theft. Either way, it doesn't change my recommendations: wear a mask, get your damn flu shot, and let's get through this winter.
posted by saturday_morning at 7:27 AM on December 15, 2022 [33 favorites]

We've built a society in the US that doesn't take care of people, really at all, and when that's paired with the self-interest that mostly-unregulated capitalism has conditioned into all of us our whole lives, our recent struggles have made plain that we're collectively in a pretty shitty, selfish place right now. This realization has been the hardest part of the past six years or so, to me, and it's a condition that will persist for the rest of my life, even if I live another 50 years.
posted by LooseFilter at 7:29 AM on December 15, 2022 [9 favorites]

The term "immunity debt" is newly coined, poorly defined and means different things to different people. The Association of Health Care Journalists recommends against using it.
posted by BlueJae at 7:30 AM on December 15, 2022 [12 favorites]

Since I've lost a child to a hospital capacity/screw-up (both - screw up first and then couldn't get an OR) issue, I just live in a state of agitation about it.

Right now in Ontario (so no, it's not just the US. It's also the UK.) there are kids who are not getting the care they need. A few will die, and their parents will be...not lied to, but they will be told the facts in a way that elides the truth. That the child's status dropped too fast to respond (true, if you leave off the points where you could have caught the warning signs if you were in a proper ward with experienced people with time to notice them), that they tried as hard as they could to save them (true, once the code is called, but 'as hard as they could' means 6 people responded instead of 8) and so on. If you're in the middle of that experience - shock, trauma, grief - you tend to not react for some time.

And then people don't want to listen to you.

When I told the story of my daughter's delivery to my new ob and his nurse in my next pregnancy, they were gentle, and caring. They asked if I could bring her chart in. I did (we'd pulled everything in advance of a lawsuit that we ended up dropping), and both of them apologized to me because...they hadn't believed me. Things simply do not go that wrong. But they did.

We're in that situation now. A few children are losing their lives to not just the lack of masking, which is one layer, but crashing our hospitals again and again and again. And our politicians, especially here in Ontario under thug Doug Ford and psychopath Sheila Jones who says this is "according to plan," simply do not give a fuck. I am still not sure where to go from where.

Additionally, all the cancelled other procedures have an impact. I mention this on Twitter about every three weeks but if my younger son's eye surgery had been delayed 6 months, his brain would never have learned to focus his eyes together in may have given up on sight completely. It was 'elective' in the sense that it was not life-saving surgery, but it was life quality saving. These are the things that are NOT HAPPENING.

Ontario is unique in that we already had not-enough-hospital-beds due to cuts and cuts. But we're not THAT unique. Fight for public health, but also fight for health funding.
posted by warriorqueen at 7:32 AM on December 15, 2022 [36 favorites]

A good friend of mine just/still is serving as a primary support person for friends of hers whose 3-week-old baby was in the ICU with RSV. She and her wife took the family's toddler along on a family trip so the parents could focus on the baby, and just this past week the baby and one parent stayed with them while the other cared for the toddler, who had come down with flu.

Obviously, the baby is alive and home, if she was staying with my friend this past week. But it was not at all a given. There were many scary ups and downs, from her being put back on oxygen after having graduated to room air, to a moment when the doctors were planning to put her into a coma for a week while they treated her (that terrifying possibility ended up not happening).

I was my friend's dump-out support person during this time, and I was happy to do it, but it did mean I rode the emotional roller-coaster with her. I am now very invested in this baby, who otherwise might have been no more than a blip in my life: "My friends just had a baby! Here's a picture!" "Oh, how nice!"

The baby and her family were lucky. They had access to the NICU. Despite medication and staffing shortages, she was able to get everything she needed.

But it was a scary thing to go through. I said I was happy to be my friend's dump-out support person, but I was also terrified that the baby would die, and I would have to go through that with her at relatively close range. Instead, I get to experience the joy and relief with her. But it might have been otherwise.
posted by Well I never at 7:37 AM on December 15, 2022 [6 favorites]

We took her to a hospital. The staff treated her right away. We were home later that afternoon. Back then, hospitals weren’t full of babies with respiratory viruses.

My only problem with this is that I don't find this to be correct. Hospitals in my area literally advertise their ER waits on billboards, and have for a solid decade. My oldest kid is 11 now, but yes, I have had a 9 hour wait in the waiting room of the ER during flu season, and eventually she was seen in a hallway.

And my local hospital just had to fight a hospital expansion with the city because it might cast some shade on a few apartments.

Extremely long ER waits have been around for a long time. Nobody cared years ago, nobody cares now. The system is set up for people to care more about themselves than the plight of others.
posted by The_Vegetables at 7:38 AM on December 15, 2022 [4 favorites]

Hospitals in my area literally advertise their ER waits on billboards, and have for a solid decade

Looks like the future is already here for you, but I've never seen anything like that
posted by ockmockbock at 8:33 AM on December 15, 2022 [6 favorites]

My husand's mom is an anti-vaxxer type and she'll want to go out to see her friends... me and my husband have been talking about him masking at work, etc etc during this winter surge when the baby has no immune system but suddenly there will be 3x more people around the baby? I really just want to say no.

Yikes. One of the worst things to come out of the Omicron wave is the way people talk about how it presents more mildly in adults than Delta did, while completely glossing over the fact that it is far more severe for children, and in particular infants.
posted by joedan at 8:38 AM on December 15, 2022 [4 favorites]

Thank you, mittens, chariot pulled by cassowaries, and BlueJae.

I’m another person with ER wait times advertised on signs in my area, dating back before the pandemic.
posted by cupcakeninja at 8:41 AM on December 15, 2022 [1 favorite]

One of the worst things to come out of the Omicron wave is the way people talk about how it presents more mildly in adults than Delta did, while completely glossing over the fact that it is far more severe for children, and in particular infants.

I don't think your point is supported by your link.

"Although population-based COVID-19–associated hospitalization rates among infants aged <6 months increased in the Omicron variant–predominant periods compared with the Delta variant–predominant period, indicators of the most severe disease among hospitalized infants aged <6 months did not."

In other words, more babies overall were hospitalized with Covid during the Omicron period, but they weren't necessarily any sicker than babies admitted during the Delta period. There could be many reasons for increased hospitalizations, as the paper mentions.
posted by saturday_morning at 8:51 AM on December 15, 2022 [3 favorites]

The_Vegetables: The system is set up for people to care more about themselves than the plight of others.

But, uh, isn't this you two weeks ago?
"...a lot of us did the math and said that getting possibly seriously sick was not worth the tradeoff vs the currently occurring daily mental breakdown. I did the math and get the seriousness of COVID -, I'd rather be sick than isolated. If you don't like that answer, that's fine. But that's one I've made."
Getting sick -- covid, rsv, flu, all of it -- carries a risk to yourself as well as a risk to others.

I think through both of your comments you've kind of hit on the heart of the matter. People are human. They make human decisions, and human mistakes, and we all pay for it.
posted by mochapickle at 9:02 AM on December 15, 2022 [7 favorites]

yep, praemunire. that's my point. people, including the member I mentioned here, are making the decisions they feel are the best, and may actually even be the best options for everyone overall, and yet here we are.
posted by mochapickle at 9:07 AM on December 15, 2022

saturday_morning, thanks for your helpful explanation. I asked Mrs. Caviar, who is a top-tier nurse, about this and I think she is saying pretty much what you are (correct me if I'm wrong):

1) There's no evidence of the "lazy immune system" idea - that somehow not getting exposed to stuff for the past 2 years makes people more susceptible to these various infections, BUT
2) There are more people out there (like babies) who have *never* been exposed to things (immune-naive) and maybe there are more virulent strains of flu/RSV this year, AND
3) There's some evidence of "immunity theft" where having COVID resets or sabotages your immune system, making you more vulnerable to other things, in the same way that measles does.

Measles is a weird one. I don't have a link, but I know early in COVID they tested the MMR vaccine to see if it helped prevent COVID. Mrs. Caviar also remembers one of the covid-cruise-ship scenarios where they looked at people who somehow didn't get sick and a lot of them had had recent MMR boosters. I'd love to head more expert analysis of this.

And what's been said above: get vaccinated (COVID/flu/MMR ... all the vaxxes), mask when needed, and be careful out there!
posted by caviar2d2 at 9:25 AM on December 15, 2022 [6 favorites]

"nobody got exposed to enough viruses for 2 years and this has made their immune systems lazy and bad".

This is where one of my co-workers whom I share an office with has landed. She blames masking for all the kids getting sick. "Their immune systems didn't get exposed to this so here we are!"

p.s. where my mom lives in Greenville, SC, they also have billboards that advertise ER wait times. They have had them since the 00s.
posted by Kitteh at 10:19 AM on December 15, 2022 [1 favorite]

As I was reading this thread, I got a call from the school nurse that our kid has a fever and a cough and needs to come home. The shelves in our part of the US have been empty of kid flu and cold medication for weeks. The emergency rooms are overflowing with children, many of whom are in varying degrees of respiratory distress.

Two months ago, I had a minor-seeming cold that came up negative for COVID and lasted all of 48 hours, yet left me short of breath for weeks. I was in good health and went from regularly doing spin classes on my home bike to not being able to walk for a block without having to stand and pant for breath while holding onto my spouse's arm. I couldn't breathe while lying on my back. I couldn't climb stairs without feeling my heart race for half an hour afterwards. Steroids have been helpful in restoring function, but I'm not what I was. The doctors tell me that it might have been COVID or RSV, but it might just have been that a random cold triggered latent asthma, and I may just have to accept with this as a consequence of any minor respiratory infection or virus that I get from now on.

It feels like I'm living in an entirely different world than my coworkers on Zoom, none of whom have young children, and who are planning holiday travel and happily talking about choosing to start daily indoor unmasked exercise sessions with strangers.
posted by joyceanmachine at 10:24 AM on December 15, 2022 [16 favorites]

This article from 2019 shows that measles definitely affects one's immune system:
Two detailed studies of blood from unvaccinated Dutch children who contracted measles now reveal how such infections can also compromise the immune system for months or years afterward, causing the body to "forget" immunity it had developed to other pathogens in the past.

I don't think they've done enough studies to know if Covid-19 has a similar effect, but I know a lot of virologists who say they would not be surprised if it does.
posted by drossdragon at 11:41 AM on December 15, 2022 [3 favorites]

In other words, more babies overall were hospitalized with Covid during the Omicron period, but they weren't necessarily any sicker than babies admitted during the Delta period.

I’m sure that’s a small comfort to the parents waiting in ER rooms at hospitals running out of medicine right now.
posted by joedan at 12:00 PM on December 15, 2022 [1 favorite]

cupcakeninja, health experts have been saying that the main evidence against immunity debt is that countries like Sweden which avoided public health measures during the early days of COVID are seeing the same surge in influenza and RSV as countries that had public health measures during the early days of COVID. If masking, staying home, etc caused immunity debt, we'd be expecting NOT to see it in Sweden.

One of the complexities in comparing public health measures between countries is that people will react to those measures and to events around them in different ways. There was an anomalous pattern to comparing UK and French lockdown measures in 2020 that was resolved once adherence data was included - basically the UK case rate went down earlier and faster than it should if you just modelled the government measures but that ignored the fact that the general public in the UK radically altered their behaviour in the two weeks or so before official measures were declared (and there's a whole interesting story here - when the pubs were "closed" on that Friday we all remember there was no legal power used to do it, just the government said they should) and also, certain aspects of the French lockdown regulations were never fully adhered to.

So Sweden may not have done as much compulsory things but that doesn't mean that it was business as usual.

On the specific topic of RSV, our nine-month old has a two-thirds chance of having received RSV antibodies as part of the HARMONIE study so hopefully we will be the last generation of parents to have to worry about this particular illness.
posted by atrazine at 12:08 PM on December 15, 2022 [4 favorites]

In the essay the author talks about not feeling a sense of community, of empty words of support without action that would actually provide the much needed support, etc. As the parent of a child with an invisible, rare, and life-threatening genetic disorder diagnosed via newborn screening, it’s fascinating to see what it takes for other people to come to the realization themselves that no one cares.

Pre-pandemic, we once visited family out of town, but nobody told us one of the kids had a cold. When we arrived, they immediately sneezed in my child’s face. My kid got sick and spent 5 days in the hospital when we got home. The family was shocked - they had no idea that what we reminded them about for years (letting us know if people were symptomatic before we saw them) was actually important.

Immunocompromised people know that nobody cares. Chronically ill people know that nobody cares. Disabled people know that nobody cares. Caregivers of medically-fragile people know that nobody cares. The pandemic has killed any hope I might have had about my child’s extended family, school, or broader community coming together to keep him healthy. It fucking sucks, but it is not a pandemic surprise for us - we realized within days of our baby’s diagnosis that we were on our own. I find it fascinating that now, almost three years into the pandemic, some people are just starting to realize it themselves.
posted by Maarika at 12:14 PM on December 15, 2022 [24 favorites]

I just came home from a nearly three week stint in the hospital, which probably should have killed me, looking at the list I saw today of how I presented. There are a lot of noises and announcements one hears when in the ICU and the step down ICU. Some were more mellow sounding when they began, but then were “Code ______ (insert color here) to the (insert hospital location here).”

I looked some up. Old people in cardiac arrest,, people with weapons, etc. was talking to one of my nurses about Code Blue messages, which are breathing problems, many, many of which were to the pediatric ER admittence. She said those were kids with RSV, and they were likely dying at that moment. It was really wearing her out to hear those, and to know what it meant. As it did then for me. I then got moved to the surgical floor, where they don’t play those messages. Very tragic stuff going on. Put on your damn masks and save a child’s life.
posted by Windopaene at 1:07 PM on December 15, 2022 [17 favorites]

Collectively, we as a species are just not smart enough to make it in the long run (like, cockroach-style long run), and the pandemic and how it was handled is more evidence of this. In a just world the people who fucked everything up would be bearing the brunt of the consequences of their actions, but of course we do not live in a just world.
posted by The Card Cheat at 1:28 PM on December 15, 2022 [1 favorite]

It’s almost too terrible to contemplate but part of me wonders how differently people would have responded to the pandemic if children were affected the way that the elderly were.
posted by kat518 at 4:08 PM on December 15, 2022 [1 favorite]

I find it fascinating that now, almost three years into the pandemic, some people are just starting to realize it themselves.

I have autoimmune problems and it was bad enough before I was put on an immune suppressant this fall, but it's really hard now. In the Before Times, my social life centered around eating out, and it's just not safe to do that now. It's really hard when everybody else around me except Mr Epigrams wants to eat out. Safe hugs to you, Maarika; you are not alone.
posted by gentlyepigrams at 4:29 PM on December 15, 2022 [6 favorites]

We have had wait time billboards for at least a decade here. They advertised wait times around three hours. The current wait time at the ER is 27 HOURS. Some area hospitals are up to 36 hour wait times. As a frequent visitor of ERs for the last decade, six - nine hours is about what I expected a visit to take. I can not imagine being in one of our tent hospitals right now while it’s 15°. Nor can I imagine going in with cardiac problems and sitting for over a day. People are sitting in pools of their own blood in ER waiting rooms here.

The billboards used to tell you that you could be seen relatively quickly. Now they don’t have enough digits to display the wait time. They’ve been taken down and you can now go to the hospital website to scroll through and see where you might be seen before day after tomorrow.
posted by Bottlecap at 5:28 PM on December 15, 2022 [4 favorites]

It’s almost too terrible to contemplate but part of me wonders how differently people would have responded to the pandemic if children were affected the way that the elderly were.

It’s hard to say, people can really be selfish sometimes, but they couldn’t have kept schools and daycare open (or reopened as soon if they closed) and every parent would probably be burnt out from stress or grief at this moment. And as a parent I sure as heck wouldn’t go working in an office if bringing COVID back was a great risk to my child…. So imagine how reluctant any parent working in the healthcare system would be… I know nurses/doctors who slept in their basement in isolation of their family for months during the pandemic to keep them relatively safe… add that stress on top of the general fatigue…

Also it’s easier (too easy?) to social distance from your parents than from your kids.

I have to stop thinking about this…
posted by WaterAndPixels at 5:34 PM on December 15, 2022

All of this is terrifying. I'm due in a week and my in-laws want to fly in and stay for a month to help with the baby?… I really just want to say no.

Please just say no! Not only to keep your child safe, but also to not have to deal with 3x more people.
posted by bendy at 6:25 PM on December 15, 2022 [9 favorites]

One of them already bought the plane ticket, sadly. She didn't even ask me first.
posted by subdee at 8:22 PM on December 15, 2022 [1 favorite]

One of them already bought the plane ticket, sadly. She didn't even ask me first.

Plane tickets can be changed!

"Due to COVID precautions, that won't be possible." and just stand your ground.

Imagine if your child got permanent heart damage from COVID (or died!) because you didn't want to hurt someone's feelings.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 8:48 PM on December 15, 2022 [4 favorites]

“Oh, I wish you had asked before doing that! We won’t be accepting visitors for another couple months.” Stand your ground! RSV is particularly contagious and bad for infants. If you don’t want to bring up Covid because it’s political, RSV is a very good reason not to take visitors.
posted by Bottlecap at 12:57 AM on December 16, 2022 [12 favorites]

Thanks for all the words of support guys... We decided to limit to close family only and require vaccinations and masks. We're emphasizing flu over COVID since I had COVID during pregnancy anyway (twice... Sadly) and for the political reasons, yeah.

RSV is pretty concerning but that's why we're asking for the masks, hand washing, etc and all the rest of it. I also read that more than half of infants get RSV in their first two years in the US in "normal" times so if there wasn't the shortage of children's medicine etc I don't think we'd be as worried about it.
posted by subdee at 5:35 AM on December 19, 2022

The reality is that we'll need the help of at least one grandparent anyway so we can't turn everyone away.
posted by subdee at 5:36 AM on December 19, 2022

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