Right now, many emergency departments across the country are overwhelmed, and it's not because

of COVID.

Here's Dr. Juan Salazar, chief physician at the Connecticut Children's Medical Center.

Compared to COVID, I mean RSV is just sort of a completely different magnitude.

RSV, it's a respiratory virus.

And right now, there's a major outbreak in young kids, leading to large numbers of hospitalizations.

And this is affecting pediatric hospitals like nothing we saw with COVID.

What does it look like if you walk the halls of your hospital right now with all these sick

children?

So we're very full right now and on any given time, we have about a hundred and ten

a hundred and fifteen kids that are in the emergency department between the waiting room,

getting triage into a room, getting taken care of, and then the hallways.

We actually have gurneys in the hallways now with kids because it's that busy to provide

the care.

So we have three times as many kids as we normally would see in our emergency department.

The magnitude of the rate of hospitalization for children is just absolutely astonishing.

Doctors have known about this virus for decades, but there's never been a vaccine for RSV.

Until now.

Welcome to the journal, our show about money, business, and power.

I'm Ryan Knudson.

It's Monday, November 14th.

Coming up on the show, a new vaccine for an old virus.

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