WASHINGTON — On Long Island, N.Y., hospitals are scrambling to bring extra workers in to handle a 50% surge in visitors to emergency rooms. In Galveston, Texas, the local hospital ran out of flu testing kits after being overwhelmed with patients worried about having contracted swine flu.
At Loma Linda University Medical Center near San Bernardino, emergency room workers have set up a tent in the parking lot to handle a crush of similar patients. In Chicago, ER visits at the city's biggest children's hospital are double normal levels, setting records at the 121-year-old institution.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Saturday, May 16, 2009 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 4 National Desk 1 inches; 57 words Type of Material: Correction
Swine flu: A photo caption accompanying a May 1 article in Section A about how hospitals were swamped with patients incorrectly said a tent in the parking lot at Loma Linda University's hospital was being used to accommodate the emergency room overflow. The tent was used to accommodate the overflow in the urgent care clinic's waiting room.
So far, few of the anxious patients have had more than runny noses. But the widening outbreak of swine flu, also known as H1N1 flu, is exposing a potentially critical hole in the nation's defenses.
Across the country, emergency care facilities are straining at the seams even though the outbreak is relatively small and the federal government has launched a mammoth disease-control effort -- dispatching antiviral drugs to states, attempting to contain the limited number of cases and beginning to develop a vaccine against it.
"It is a major Achilles' heel in our state of readiness," said Dr. Irwin Redlener, director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University. "If we get a situation that is really out of hand with large numbers of people affected, I fear that our hospital and healthcare facilities simply won't have the materials or even the staffing to respond," he said.
Redlener and others are quick to point out that the outbreak is still a long way from such a critical stage.
Of the 136 cases of H1N1 flu authorities had confirmed in the United States as of Thursday night, only a handful required hospitalization.
By contrast, the Department of Health and Human Services' moderate pandemic influenza model, based on the last flu pandemic in 1968, envisions 90 million Americans becoming infected and 865,000 requiring hospitalization.
"If the outbreak stays in what I would characterize as its present mild form, I think we're in great shape," said James Bentley, senior vice president at the American Hospital Assn. "The key question becomes how many people at any one time have the flu, and how many people have it severely."
Prompted by the global SARS and avian flu outbreaks this decade, federal health officials and hospitals nationwide have been working to beef up preparations for possible disease outbreaks, helped by more than $2 billion in federal grants.
