Feverish and aching patients continue to inundate Hawaii’s overstressed health care system during a flu season that has no end in sight.
"This week is worse than last week, and last week was worse than the week before," said Toby Clairmont, director of emergency services for the hospital group Healthcare Association of Hawaii. "This could go on for a week — or a month — because the flu is unpredictable."
With emergency rooms undergoing renovation at Castle Medical Center, Straub Clinic & Hospital and Wahiawa General Hospital, ambulances were rerouted Monday to emergency rooms already reeling with an influx of flu cases at a time when health care workers are also calling in sick with the flu.
"Hawaii does not have a tremendous capacity to see a surge of patients," Clairmont said. "The flu is taking us over the threshold of being able to manage it."
Health care officials from across the islands participated Thursday in a series of meetings, "and front and center on the agenda was influenza," Clairmont said.
People sick with the flu who call for an ambulance will not be seen ahead of other patients already waiting in an emergency room, Clairmont said.
Unless they have a more serious additional condition such as chest pains, flu patients are better off staying home and calling their physicians, who can prescribe medications over the phone, which will help ease the pressure on ambulances and emergency rooms.
"Don’t come in (to a hospital) unless your physician tells you to come in," Clairmont advised. "We can’t cure the flu. We can’t stop the flu."
At the Queen’s Medical Center, 30 patients were in isolation Thursday for conditions that included the flu, said Cindy Kamikawa, interim senior vice president of operations.
"It’s a little higher than normal," Kamikawa said. "We didn’t see this many last year."
An unknown number of flu patients also were treated in the Queen’s emergency room and sent home, Kamikawa said.
The Queen’s emergency room saw an estimated 190 to 200 patients Thursday, which Kamikawa said was "not totally full of flu patients," adding, "We’re not sure if we’re at a peak or we’re on the downslope."
The flu is hitting the islands at the same time that people are coming down with other viruses, said Dr. Melissa Viray, the state Health Department’s deputy state epidemiologist.
"There is an uptick not just in influenza, but other respiratory illnesses in general," she said.
Even with the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reporting that the current flu vaccine is only 23 percent effective, Viray encouraged everyone to get vaccinated, which could help reduce the severity and duration of flu symptoms.
Viray and others also repeated the plea for people to stay home when they’re sick to reduce spreading the flu — and to practice basic hygiene methods such as regular hand washing, avoiding contact with sick people and using hand sanitizers.
But Warner "Kimo" Sutton, onetime Republican lieutenant governor candidate, could not find any hand sanitizer at Costco on Wednesday.
"I was looking for Purell and they were out of Purell," he said.
Linda Spaulding, an infection control consultant to Oahu nursing facilities, said Thursday, "I’ve been in meetings about the flu all morning. Obviously, everybody knows that the flu is on island now."
Three Oahu nursing facilities she works with have seen a combined 10 to 15 flu patients since Friday and are no longer accepting new patients. The facilities are all recommending that visitors stay away.
"There is so much flu in the community, we don’t want the community to come in and start an outbreak again," Spaulding said.
Most of the elderly flu patients were vaccinated, Spaulding said.
However, they typically do not have a fever — usually just a cough. But younger health care workers at the facilities have fevers over 100 degrees, sore throats, body aches and a general "malaise," Spaulding said.
"Some of the staff who were not vaccinated are having all of the symptoms," she said. "But the vaccine may be protecting (older patients) from sore throat and everything else. This year we’re seeing the flu in a different way."
CORRECTION: The hand sanitizer Purell was misspelled as Prell in an earlier version of this story.
