DETROIT — Emergency rooms across the state are overcrowded and patients are waiting longer than usual due to an influx of influenza.

Charles Gibson, chief medical officer for Corewell Health in West Michigan, and Matthew Sims, director of infectious disease research for Corewell Health in Southeast Michigan, said at a virtual news conference that as respiratory infections are increasing, patients are overcrowding emergency rooms rather than going to primary care doctors or urgent care facilities.

Sims said influenza positivity rates are up 25-30%, with 10% of emergency room cases being influenza, and 20% of those patients admitted to the hospital. Respiratory syncytial virus positivity has decreased on the east side of the state but remains high on the west side.

"The problem becomes when people are sort of using the ER as their primary care or more as urgent care instead of as an emergency room," Sims said. "If you're having trouble breathing, if you're getting dehydrated because you're so sick, if you just are not able to function, you can't carry out your activities of daily living, that's a good reason to come with emergency room. If you just kind of have the aches and pains, the fever associated with flu, that's a good reason to call your doctor or go to urgent care."

Sims added that every year an influenza surge takes place sometime between November and March and the illness accounts for 10,000 to 70,000 deaths nationally per year. The medical officials also encouraged patients to get flu vaccinations.

Henry Ford Health is seeing an increase in patients at emergency departments for respiratory illnesses as well as injuries from icy conditions, according to a statement emailed by spokesperson Magdalena Wegrzyn.

Detroit Medical Center and Michigan Medicine did not respond immediately to inquiries about emergency room waits.

According to the weekly Michigan Flu Focus report issued Jan. 31 by the state Department of Health and Human Services, the Great Lakes State ranked very high in flu activity for the week ending Jan 25. As of Feb. 1, about 9.7% of emergency visits reported in the state were associated with acute respiratory viruses, resulting in 4,811 hospital admissions, according to the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services.

The state health department's seasonal respiratory viruses summary reports that 7.4% of emergency department visits last week were associated with influenza leading to 2,586 hospital admissions, 1.6% of emergency room visits were for COVID-19 leading to 1,549 hospital admissions, and 0.8% of emergency visits were for respiratory syncytial virus leading to 676 hospital admissions.

At Corewell Health, Gibson said nurses from other departments are coming in to help the emergency department as the health system works to add staff, with employee illnesses a possibility.

Patients can see emergency room wait times online prior to visiting facilities as well be seen virtually by medical professionals and also use a symptoms guide to make sure their symptoms match the setting they're choosing to seek care.

"We're seeing quite an influx of patients related to some of the respiratory viruses that are in season right now that's wreaking a lot of havoc on how many people are coming to the hospital at once because they don't feel well," Gibson said.

"Fortunately, they're coming in to get checked in. Unfortunately, a lot of people are utilizing the ER for some of these cases ... and it's not always necessarily the best place for them to go.

"What that's translated into is a lot of people come into the hospital all at once and so that correlates to longer wait times in the emergency department where we have to see everybody, evaluate them, figure out what's going on, we need imaging and testing and still you have to do that for every single patient. And so the more you have to do that for the larger volume of people, the longer it takes to get everybody seen and those wait times start to go up," Gibson said.

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