Editor’s Note: Here’s a quick anecdote. We had to go to the children’s hospital in Orange County, CA, this weekend. Because of a medical issue, we have been to this particular ER around a dozen times over the last five years. The place was so packed they’d partitioned off the outside area where we normally pull up and converted it to a waiting area. I asked a nurse why it was so busy, at least 5-times busier than I’d ever seen it. She said that it was actually a slow day compared to what they’ve been experiencing lately. Quite disturbing. Here’s Michael Snyder’s article…
We are witnessing an unprecedented explosion of Respiratory Syncytial Virus (RSV) all over the United States right now. RSV is the leading cause of both bronchiolitis and pneumonia in children under the age of one in this country, and globally we normally see somewhere between 100,000 and 200,000 babies die from the virus each year. The only disease that normally kills more children is malaria. But this year RSV could potentially take the number one spot because the virus is spreading like wildfire and hospitals are rapidly filling up. According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 77 percent of all pediatric hospital beds in the U.S. are currently occupied. That is an extremely high figure, and more children are being hospitalized with RSV every single day.
So why does this virus hit infants particularly hard?
Well, NBC News says that it “comes down to the basics of anatomy”…
It often comes down to the basics of anatomy, she said. Babies are born with the tiniest of airways. Viruses like RSV inflame those airways, making it difficult to breathe. The smaller the airway, the less inflammation it takes to close it off.
Sadly, RSV is a very serious threat to older adults as well.
Normally, RSV kills approximately 14,000 adults over the age of 65 in the United States each year, but that number could potentially be far higher this year because so many people have compromised immune systems.
But at this moment the biggest concern is the huge wave that we are seeing among small children. The following comes from an article about a 6-year-old child in Michigan that was just killed by RSV…
A Metro Detroit company is working to support a family who lost their child to RSV. The 6-year-old from Macomb County recently died from RSV, a common respiratory illness which is surging in Michigan.
“Last week our owner and I found out that one of our team members unfortunately and tragically lost his son to RSV,” said Ellen Bloom of Offshore Spars.
What a tragedy.
Meanwhile, hospitals all over the state are being filled up with “a record number of severely ill children with respiratory syncytial virus”…
Capacity at pediatric hospitals across Michigan is strained as a record number of severely ill children with respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV, flood emergency rooms and fill hospital beds.
“There is not a hospital in Michigan that takes care of pediatric patients that has not told us that they are feeling stress right now, immense stress,” Dr. Natasha Bagdasarian, Michigan’s chief medical executive, told the Free Press Thursday.
Officials in Michigan have never seen anything like this before.
In fact, one official is publicly admitting that her hospital is now “100% full” because the RSV outbreak in her local area has become so severe…
“We have never seen a surge in pediatric respiratory viruses like this before,” said Luanne Thomas Ewald, chief operating officer at Mott and Von Voigtlander Women’s Hospital, in a statement. “Our hospital is 100% full.”
The beginning of winter is still over a month away.
So if things are this bad now, what will conditions be like when the weather gets much colder?
At another hospital in Michigan, “some children are being treated in chairs” because there aren’t even any beds in the hallways available…
Across the state at Corewell Health Helen DeVos Children’s Hospital in Grand Rapids, some children are being treated in chairs because no rooms or even hallway beds are available. Many private rooms throughout the hospital have been converted to double rooms.
Other states are experiencing similar issues.
For example, just check out what is going on in Colorado…
The number of children being hospitalized in Colorado with viruses like the flu and RSV is unprecedented as the season for respiratory illnesses gets underway earlier than usual and more severe.
“It’s nothing like we’ve seen before,” said Dr. Kevin Carney, associate chief medical officer with Children’s Hospital Colorado.
When Colorado health officials recently held a briefing for members of the press, they showed them a graph of RSV cases that was “going up almost vertically”…
The news briefing with reporters came the day after Election Day. It was the first in weeks from the state health department, though it has issued press releases and made individual officials available for interviews.
At Wednesday’s event, they showed graphs of RSV and flu spiking dramatically, showing curves of infections going up almost vertically.
Normally, about one out of every 50 infants in the U.S. would catch RSV during the first year of life.
But it appears that number could be far higher this time around.
So many children are becoming extremely sick, and it is getting worse week after week.
I have warned my readers that we have entered an era of great pestilences, and in the current environment it is just so easy for a virus to go ripping through a population.
In this particular case, the elderly and very young children are those at greatest risk.
If there is a major RSV outbreak in your area, you will want to closely monitor members of your family that fall into either of those two groups.
Unfortunately, it won’t be too long before the entire nation is teeming with RSV cases.
***It is finally here! Michael’s new book entitled “End Times” is now available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.***
About the Author: My name is Michael and my brand new book entitled “End Times” is now available on Amazon.com. In addition to my new book I have written six other books that are available on Amazon.com including “7 Year Apocalypse”, “Lost Prophecies Of The Future Of America”, “The Beginning Of The End”, and “Living A Life That Really Matters”. (#CommissionsEarned) When you purchase any of these books you help to support the work that I am doing, and one way that you can really help is by sending copies as gifts to family and friends. Time is short, and I need help getting these warnings into the hands of as many people as possible.
I have published thousands of articles on The Economic Collapse Blog, End Of The American Dream and The Most Important News, and the articles that I publish on those sites are republished on dozens of other prominent websites all over the globe. I always freely and happily allow others to republish my articles on their own websites, but I also ask that they include this “About the Author” section with each article. The material contained in this article is for general information purposes only, and readers should consult licensed professionals before making any legal, business, financial or health decisions.
I encourage you to follow me on social media on Facebook and Twitter, and any way that you can share these articles with others is definitely a great help. These are such troubled times, and people need hope. John 3:16 tells us about the hope that God has given us through Jesus Christ: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” If you have not already done so, I strongly urge you to invite Jesus Christ to be your Lord and Savior today.
Article cross-posted from End of the American Dream.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
It is time to map RSVs genes and look for signs of genetic gain of function.