Op-Ed: RSV is packing hospitals with sick kids, but it can be contained
I’m sitting here at my computer, waiting to open my email in the early afternoon, when I get a text from my good friend and longtime colleague Matt Yglesias, who is now the New York Post’s Washington correspondent. He’s on the road for the Washington Writers Group festival, and he has an idea for me to talk about on the air that he hopes I’ll like.
“Hospitals are going crazy,” my friend writes. “We’ve heard reports of patients dying so fast, they’re getting in line at the emergency room just to get in. And now there’s a rumor circulating that the hospital is running out of doctors in order to hold on to those extra doctors, and it’s a problem because hospitals are usually like air force bases, they can only take so many airmen from one place.”
Now, I’m not a doctor by any stretch, so I’m skeptical about the idea that doctors are being used to hold back the tide of sick children and people infected with the Ebola virus. The notion that the flu could be contained to a single hospital isn’t out of the realm of possibility. So when I get Matt’s note, my initial skepticism begins to melt away. But my initial skepticism also makes me wonder: why is Matt writing to me? Why isn’t this an urgent message about Ebola?
I put the question to the people on the RSV task force I was sent to make up. That task force includes Michael Osterholm, who, as part of his work for the Obama Administration’s Task Force to Advance Healthcare Reform, has been trying to figure out what can be done to contain the spread of the Ebola virus in West Africa, as well as other health-care systems. As we wrote at the time, “Oster