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People really need to stop and reflect about the incidents of young people who died while they were in school. Younger people do get sick and die. There were probably about ten kids who died while I was in K-12. I didn’t go to big schools and this wasn’t 80 years ago.

I can recall one girl had chicken pox, a few others got pneumonia from what started out as colds or bronchitis, a few more had flu, strep, or a sinus infection that might have become meningitis. I do know that one girl had strep that made her throat close up and she basically suffocated.

And for every one of those ten, there were three more kids who ended up hospitalized from the same illnesses and some ended up in the ICU.

I do not recall ever hearing about any of these kids having some sort of condition that was a complicating factor, but it’s not as if I knew them or my parents knew their parents well. Only a couple were in my same grade.

I don’t recall there being that many obese kids when I was in school. There were several kids who could have stood to lose a few pounds. But it seems in the last decade the number of younger people who have had weight problems has sky-rocketed. By the time they are 30, they could have a head start toward diabetes, kidney problems, and other conditions that are impacted by weight and that could give them a far worse outcome when getting any virus.

The heaviest person I knew in school, a girl who would easily be considered morbidly obese, died in an oral surgeon’s chair at 16 from complications from the knock out drugs given during her wisdom teeth extractions.

Oh, and about ICU’s getting overwhelmed.

There were two times in my life when I ended up or almost ended up in the ICU. Both times it was the summer, so not flu season.

The first time I had a ruptured appendix and spent 36 hours in the ER before an ICU bed was available because it was full. There wasn’t even a bed on in the ward for patients who needed care at the level one step down from ICU.

The beds were taken up, in large part, by car accident /drunk driving and heat stroke victims, particularly those whose medications didn’t react well to heat and dehydration.

The second time I had same-day surgery that had an unexpected complication resulting in blood loss and I was unstable and very nauseated. No beds available in the ICU. No beds in the unit just below ICU level. Kept in recovery a couple hours until that unit needed every available space as more surgeries ended. No room in the ER for me either.

I was sent to the small unit where they send same-day surgery patients they can’t release yet and need to watch until they decide what to do with them. But it closes at 11 pm. I fortunately stabilized enough by then that I could have gone to a regular ward.

But that did not happen. They sent me home.

It seems the main problem at that hospital at the time was that they had a large number of surgeries scheduled, of varying levels of complexity and requiring varying levels of care afterwards. On that particular day an unusually large number of patients had complications. There were also a few weird summer accidents that caused the need for surgery and a couple of people who had heart attacks possibly brought about in some part due to overexertion in the heat. That caused the critical care wards to fill up.

My point is young people sometimes die from simple illnesses, the same illnesses, a flu, they sailed through just fine the year before. And ICU’s sometimes fill up unexpectedly on a particular day from a confluence of events. Some people aren’t even in the ICU that long. If a bed had been open for me in ICU the day I had the same- day surgery, I would have been tagged as an ICU admission but probably would have been there four hours and then sent to a regular room for overnight observation and released the next day.