"Expected to be worse": String of viruses plaguing local schools as flu season picks up
SACRAMENTO — Move over COVID-19 and even the old familiar flu. There's a list of viruses packing a punch and sending kids home from school and draining doctors.
"You know this season is expected to be worse than previous seasons," said Dr. Dean Blumberg, a Pediatric Infectious Diseases expert at UC Davis Health.
Dr. Blumberg warns about a rapid increase in not only the flu virus, but several upper respiratory viruses, including RSV, parainfluenza, rhinovirus and enterovirus. Doctors are seeing all of it and kids could end up sick for weeks.
"It is possible to get serial viral infections so you can just be getting better from one when you come down with another so sometimes we're seeing children who are just getting one after another and they seem sick all the time," said Dr. Blumberg.
Sacred Heart Parish School in Sacramento sent a letter to parents saying kids are going home sick at an "alarming rate" with nearly 100 students and staff absent at one time this week. It forced them to close down Wednesday and Thursday for disinfecting.
"It can be a perfectly healthy child we never know which child is going to get extremely ill and end up in the hospital. We have children that die every year and like you said it's shocking," said Catherine Flores Martin, the executive director of the California Immunization Coalition.
The group is now urging everyone on social media to get caught up on all vaccines.
"The children are just so susceptible from being protected by basically living in a bubble the past two and a half years that this is the rebound effect," said Dr. Blumberg.
Dr. Blumberg said there is a bit of good news: This year's flu vaccine appears to be working with the same strains that are currently circulating.