"Worried well" flooding hospitals, overcrowding emergency rooms in fear of swine flu
The swine flu bug seems to be fading, and many doctors are calling it "no more severe than ordinary flu". But the reports of horror and contagion have been unceasing in the media, even as reports of people actually dying from swine flu, or having symptoms worse than "ordinary flu", remain a relative trickle.
Unsurprisingly, emergency rooms across the nation have been jammed to capacity, and beyond since the swine-flu scare started. And this season, most of the people reporting "flu-like symptoms" turn out to have nothing at all, and are often perfectly healthy. Healthy patients thinking they are sick, happen every year, of course, but this year their proportion is huge. Doctors are worrying that they will be unable to get to actually sick or injured people, while taking the time they must for huge numbers of people who turn out to have no illness.
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http://www.cnn.com/2009/HEALTH/05/02...als/index.html
'Walking well' flood hospitals with -- or without -- flu symptoms
* Hospitals see an uptick in patients because of H1N1
* Many of patients are healthy, who are concerned after minor symptoms
* Doctors and nurses try to balance caution while allaying panic
updated 11:48 a.m. EDT, Sat May 2, 2009
By Madison Park(CNN)
A runny nose. A cough. A sore throat. And even pork eaten a week ago.
After a week of headlines about the H1N1 virus, or swine flu, many emergency rooms and hospitals are crammed with people, many of whom don't need to be there.
The visits by the "worried well" have triggered concerns of overburdening the nation's hospitals and emergency departments, several health care professionals told CNN.
This week, some hospitals saw record numbers of patients. A few emergency departments shut down to paramedics because of overcrowding.
"We have had a lot of nervous patients with minimal respiratory tract symptoms," said Dr. Mark Bell, principal of Emergent Medical Associates, which operates 18 emergency departments in Southern California. "It has caused signficiant amount of delays in emergency care. They're all walking well."
"I haven't seen such a panic among communities perhaps ever," Bell said. "We are spending significant time in the emergency department, calming people down. Right now, people think if they have a cough or a cold, they're going to die. That's a scary, frightening place to be in. I wish that this hysteria had not occurred and that we had tempered a little bit of our opinions and thoughts and fears in the media. It just went haywire."
In California, triage tents were set outside. Clinics doubled their traffic in major cities like Dallas, Texas, and Chicago, Illinois. In the Los Angeles area, some Emergent Medical Associates locations shut down their paramedic traffic.
"We're closing to the real emergencies that may be befalling our community," said Bell. "There is a little sense of hysteria among the community about the H1N1 virus."
Emergency rooms are usually crowded and "if you increase that volume, you're throwing them right over the edge," said Bill Briggs, president of the Emergency Nurses' Association.
"This has the potential to clog the system and emergency departments already facing serious crowding issues throughout the U.S.," said Briggs, a registered nurse at Tufts Medical Center, in Boston, Massachusetts.
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