In the winter of 2022, two parents carried their sick, coughing baby boy into an emergency room deep in California’s Sierra Nevada mountains. The small rural hospital had no pediatric specialists, no pediatric nurses, and no children’s intensive care unit. But it was hours closer than any hospital that did.
The doctor at that rural hospital recognized immediately that the baby’s condition was beyond their capacity to treat. They called regional children’s hospitals like ours for help. But the winter of 2022 was the peak of the “tripledemic” — Covid, influenza, and RSV striking children simultaneously — and every children’s hospital in northern California was overwhelmed. None of us had room for one more.