Perhaps the culprit is respiratory syncytial virus, known as RSV, which is on the rise this season.
NEW YORK – Sean Merriam has been roaming the city for almost a month with a stuffy nose and a mysterious cough that continues to pound his lungs. lungs🇧🇷 He knows it’s not COVID-19because he undergoes regular examinations, and it is not the flufrom which he recovered a few weeks ago.
The culprit could be the virus respiratory syncytial, known as RSV, which is increasing this season, but not sure. It could be anything, really.
“Through periods where I think it’s passed and then I cough and say, yeah, it’s not over yet,” Merriam, 55, a video editor, panted through McCarren Park in Brooklyn, said Thursday. “It just won’t go away.”
Its mysterious virus is amid a maelstrom of disease plaguing New Yorkers this winter with puzzling and pitiful symptoms: a toxic cocktail compounded by apartments, subway cars and cramped classrooms where masks are now optional.
Faced with such a relentless onslaught, New Yorkers seem to have mixed emotions, feeling apprehensive, tired, and resigned to a new “new normal.” They live among not only the coronavirus and its seemingly endless variants, but a host of other viruses as well. Infectious disease experts have noted that other respiratory diseases such as rhinoviruses and adenoviruses are also circulating.
“There’s always a disease going around,” said Lester Sykes, 35, who lives in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood and was walking his dog Raja. “Everyone is hyper-aware of health now,” he said.
“It’s about the feelings you have until you get sick,” she said. “So when you get sick, you have to deal with it.”
According to city data, the number of covid cases has increased about 31 percent since the beginning of the year. Thanksgiving Day and is now at about 3,600 a day. The total number of cases is much higher, because that number doesn’t include home testing, which is now prevalent. Meanwhile, flu cases have skyrocketed over the past two weeks and are at their highest levels since 2018. The good news: RSV appears to have peaked in mid-November and is on the decline, although its levels are still tall.
While city officials are recommending that New Yorkers wear masks in indoor public spaces, few heed this call. School attendance also remains relatively high, although it has recently decreased slightly. Restaurants and cafés are full and offices are showing no signs of closing. People still go to the cinema, bars and concert halls.
Still, mothers and fathers are concerned, especially those of children born at the beginning or during the pandemic, when the confinement it protected them from germs and may have made them more vulnerable to the current crop of viruses.
Merriam’s two daughters, 10 and 13, have both the coronavirus and the flu. He’s never been concerned about sore throats, but now that the disease is in the news—following fatal cases in Britain, where nearly 20 children have died of strep A, a bacterial infection that causes sore throats— he is more aware.
The doctor. Matthew Harris, a Northwell Health physician who specializes in pediatric emergency medicine at Cohen Children’s Medical Center in Queens, said the flu and RSV appeared earlier than expected in the fall and in greater volume and severity. Historically RSV starts to peak in mid-November and stays through spring, he said, but this year the virus arrived a month early.
RSV was the predominant viral cause of Cohen’s hospitalization, followed by influenza, he said, while Covid was not a significant contributor. Over the past seven days, she said, the hospital has seen an average of 260 children in the emergency room a day and is operating at between 105% and 120% capacity.
He added that many children came with several viruses at the same time, such as a combination of flu and coronavirus.
“Part of it probably has to do with the fact that children are now being exposed to viruses that they haven’t had any immune exposure to in the last couple of years, because of masks, social distancing and so on,” Harris said. “The very nature of these viral diseases has changed due to the mitigation strategies that have been adopted.”
At Cohen Hospital, staff are “overworked,” he said, with emergency department visits and stays on the rise and a shortage of pediatricians, a national trend.
“The percentage of children needing ICU admission is not substantially higher than it used to be,” he added, “but the total number of children showing up is far higher than anything I’ve ever seen. If look at the last ten years of our children’s hospital, the busiest seven days have been in the last month”.
Judith Cabanas, 28, a mother of two who lives in Astoria, Queens, said she was anxious because her 5-year-old son, Benjamin, has been ill for months.
“Every week he gets sick, with fever, cough, runny nose,” he said. “I’m scared”.
Cabanas had to keep Benjamin at home and said he needs to look up Tylenol for kids in the Facebook, because the product is out of stock in pharmacies. Though she’s relieved that her 2-year-old daughter Lily looks healthy so far, she expects the season to take a turn for the worse.
“I just want winter to be over,” she said.
This article was originally posted on New York Times🇧🇷 / TRANSLATION BY RENATO PRELORENTZOU
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Ben Stock is a lifestyle journalist and author at Gossipify. He writes about topics such as health, wellness, travel, food and home decor. He provides practical advice and inspiration to improve well-being, keeps readers up to date with latest lifestyle news and trends, known for his engaging writing style, in-depth analysis and unique perspectives.
