Hospitals around Michigan are seeing a high volume of patients due to the flu, COVID, and RSV. In fact, it’s more like a quademic with norovirus, a stomach ailment, also present.

Dr. Robert Nolan is the Chief Medical Officer at Corewell Health South in St. Joseph and tells us this is usually a busy time for hospitals, but having multiple illnesses going around has added to the strain.

“People are having not only the classic respiratory ones, which gives you the body aches and the headache and the low-grade fever and the coughs and the runny noses and just feeling miserable, but they’re also kind of getting the diarrhea and vomiting with it as well from secondary viruses,” Nolan said.

So, the hospital has to watch patients for dehydration and an inability to keep medication down.

Nolan says Influenza A is a big reason for ER visits, along with COVID. He adds people with chronic illnesses, like COPD, have been struggling all the more.

“It seems that some of our adults are being impacted by more of the classic common cold viruses that we’ve seen in the past. It’s just hitting them a lot harder, having harder times breathing, much more symptomatic than your kind of run-of-the-mill cold that we would see like four or five years ago.”

In Grand Rapids, Corewell Health Helen DeVos Children’s Hospital has implemented visitor restrictions due to the high number of patients. That hasn’t been done in St. Joseph, but Nolan says on days when admissions are high, wait times in the ER can increase.

Nolan advises anyone who’s sick to stay home, wash their hands frequently, and to cough into their arm. Nolan notes the current bugs going around are lingering with people as long as 17 days, but he says you’ve got to be patient and wait until you’re better before running around in public.

Nolan also notes it’s not too late to get a flu shot.