Winnipeg children's emergency department 'in crisis' amid spike in respiratory virus cases: medical director

The emergency department at the Winnipeg Children's Hospital is in crisis as it struggles to keep up with a spike in respiratory virus cases, the department's medical director says.

On Tuesday, 178 children showed up at the hospital's emergency department for care — about a 45 per cent increase from the number of kids expected this time of year before the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. Elisabete Doyle said.

"The children's hospital emergency department right now is actually in crisis," Doyle said outside the Health Sciences Centre Winnipeg's Children's Hospital on Wednesday.

"We're seeing more volume and more acuity than we've seen even pre-pandemic, in large, large volumes. It's unprecedented."

The surge in cases of respiratory viruses in Manitoba over the last few weeks is linked to both how many respiratory viruses are circulating in the community and eased pandemic rules that have allowed those illnesses to re-emerge, Doyle said.

Some kids showing up to the emergency department are also what Doyle called relatively "immune naive" — meaning they haven't been exposed to the respiratory viruses before, so when they do, they get sick.

Care teams have also been seeing kids test positive for more than one respiratory virus at the same time, Shared Health, which oversees health-care delivery in Manitoba, said last week.

Virologist Julie Lajoie said she wasn't surprised to hear how much Winnipeg's children's hospital is struggling, especially as cases of illnesses like RSV — or respiratory syncytial virus — surge among kids across Canada.

Lajoie said the current uptick in cases of RSV is happening earlier in the season than usual. But while the total number of cases is still lower than what Manitoba saw this time last year, the surge in emergency department visits is new, she said.

As for what caused that change, Lajoie said the culprit could be any one of a number of factors — including that with more types of viruses circulating this year, kids are more likely to have multiple infections at the same time, which strains their immune systems.

Many kids also got COVID-19 for the first time in the spring and wintertime, Lajoie said, suggesting those infections could have left their immune systems more vulnerable to other viruses.

And shortages of some children's pain relievers may be leaving some parents with fewer options to stave off an emergency hospital visit, she said.

"So those are possibilities coming all together," said Lajoie, a research associate at the University of Manitoba.

"It's all hypothesis — we don't really know, but it's a cocktail altogether that is not really good right now."