After weeks of poor air quality and seasonal changes, physicians in Seattle and Tacoma say they’re seeing unprecedented volumes of children with respiratory illnesses. Numbers from Mary Bridge Childrens’ Hospital show that 60% of the visits to the Emergency Department are respiratory-related. “Anybody who has a respiratory problem to begin with has had a really bad fall so far,” said Dr. Grant Keeney, who works in the Emergency Department as a Pediatric Emergency physician. Dr. Keeney said that in the past week alone, 30% of their virus tests came back positive for a respiratory virus, with a third of those testing positive for RSV. Dr. Russell Migita, attending physician and a clinical leader of Emergency Services at Seattle Children’s wrote in a statement that, "throughout our hospital and urgent care clinics, we are seeing about 20-30 positives per day. This number is likely to go higher." After two years of at-home learning, Dr. Keeney says grade schoolers are particularly susceptible to respiratory viruses like RSV, now that protocols to stop the spread of COVID aren’t being followed so closely. “That age group didn’t get sick as much, because whether it’s online remote learning, social distancing, masking, or hand washing, and now that those behaviors aren’t being commonly used, those kids’ immune systems are seeing these viruses for the first time in a while are really reacting to that,” he said. The situation puts even more strain on a hospital system already under pressure.