Aurora Hospital Sets Restrictions On Visitors After Spike In Flu Cases
CHICAGO (CBS) -- A west suburban hospital has been seeing so many people with the flu, it has instituted restrictions on who can visit patients.
Presence Mercy Medical Center in Aurora has set a limit of two visitors at a time for its patients; and adults only. Children are not permitted to visit patients.
The emergency room typically sees about 100 patients a day, but with all the flu cases, it recently has been receiving more than 130 patients per day.
This week, 7 percent of ER patients had flu symptoms.
"We've had multiple admissions. We currently have two patients in the intensive care unit that are flu-positive," said Dawn Cech, the emergency department nurse manager at Mercy.
Cech said this is late for the flu season to produce so many patients.
"Normally we see it in the latter part of December, January. We don't typically see it into March, or late February into March. So we're hoping that, it being so late in the season that it might be a shorter flu season. However, we're still seeing definitely higher volumes of patients coming in that are symptomatic," she said.