The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) predicts that convergence of high numbers reported flu cases together with still lingering Covod-19 in the US, hospitals are reportedly bracing for rough season, Yahoo News writes.

Dr. Carlos del Rio, an executive associate dean at the Emory University School of Medicine and Grady Health System in Atlanta, told the news agency “If you go around the nation and ask hospitals how busy they are, every single one of them will tell you: They’re busy”.

Likewise, Dr. James McDeavitt, executive vice president and dean of clinical affairs at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, reportedly told “Nurses were on the front line, and some of them burned out and quit. Others that were in their 50s and 60s who maybe thought they’d be working for another five years took an early retirement.”

Because the staffing shortages in the hospitals and health clinics around the country, there is little wiggle room to any potential surges in the flu and Covid-19 cases in the hospitals.

Dr del Rio added “There’s no excess capacity in hospitals. Anything that increases the number of patients is going to tip the scales.”

According to a recent analysis of the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, new Covid cases per day are expected to increase by more than 10% nationwide.

Dr. Matthew Binnicker, director of clinical virology at the Mayo Clinic, told “We’ll see an increase in Covid cases — probably not to the extent that we saw in the winter of 2020 and winter of 2021 — but we will see a rise. Most of those will be infections that lead to mild to moderate illness.”

Predicting the effects of booster shots, Jennifer Nuzzo, director of the Pandemic Center at Brown University School of Public Health, reportedly said “How much of a rise in the hospitalizations and deaths we will see is really going to depend on the extent to which people are getting up to date on their vaccines, especially those at highest risk for severe illness, such as the elderly and those with weak immune systems”.