With no room at the pediatric ICU, or no pediatric ICU A friend is a retired neonatal ICU doctor. It’s a tough gig watching premies struggle for life. Even tougher when she lost one. Tougher still for the parents. Alexander Stockton and Lucy King produced a video diary for the New York Times about how COVID, RSV and flu are hitting young kids especially hard this winter. My connection to RSV (respiratory syncytial virus) is modest but memorable. So when it pops up in the news I notice. This year it’s a tripledemic (Yale Medicine): “What we are seeing is record levels of RSV in young children. Usually, we see a spike in December or January, but it’s earlier this year,” says Scott Roberts, MD, a Yale Medicine infectious diseases specialist. Meanwhile, as of early December, RSV cases reported by Yale were beginning to go down and COVID-19 and flu cases were increasing. A big part of the flu increase, he explains, is our lack of immunity from having not been exposed to the virus for several seasons due to masking and other precautions, many of which have fallen to the wayside. […] RSV is a common and highly contagious respiratory virus that causes cold-like symptoms. Most kids are exposed to the virus by their second birthday and therefore develop a degree of immunity that makes future cases less troublesome. But for the very young it can be deadly. Even more so because the flood of young patients has hospitals streched thin.…