One of those neat trends that caught my eye in the pandemic was the regional children's hospital being completely overwhelmed by a different respiratory virus, RSV. Kids are normally constantly exposed to it in school so it generally isn't serious. Because COVID kept them out of school for a full year and away from normal immune system building through interactions with other kids, they came back to school this fall and it destroyed them. They have the same respiratory care needs as COVID patients so they're directly competing for ventilators and specialists with them in the smaller-than-adult PICUs. Those staff are harder to replace, both in terms of specialised training and in terms of finding people who can watch children die all day.

:agony-deep: thanks "save the children" antivaxxers