COVID-19 and influenza cases continue to rise along with other usual winter respiratory viruses, so there are a lot of snotty noses to be wiped across the Illawarra.
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As bad growing conditions mean customers are struggling to buy some fresh veggies like lettuce, the tissue shelves at Coles, Woolworths and Aldi supermarkets in the Illawarra have also recently become more bare than usual.
Some day care centres are also struggling to stock enough tissues to keep their children's noses clean, and have been asking parents to try to track down the much sought after product.
While supermarkets have assured customers that there is enough stock and have not imposed buying limits, as they did when people stockpiled toilet paper during the pandemic, they have asked customers to be flexible.
A Woolworths spokesperson said the supermarket was working closely with its suppliers, and said it was also seeing an increased demand for medicines to treat seasonal illnesses.
"Given the recent cold snap and early start to the flu season, there's quite a lot of demand for a range of medicinal and paper goods products including cold and flu tablets, throat lozenges and tissues," the spokesperson said.
"While customers might notice that the availability of some of their preferred brands might be limited, we continue to offer a wide range of alternatives across these ranges."
Likewise Coles said there may be a shortage of some tissue brands.
"We want to assure customers that there will be enough stock to get them through this flu season, and encourage them to be flexible if the products they would usually purchase are not available," a spokesperson said.
The need for tissues is no surprise, as respiratory illnesses circulate widely in the community.
June 2022 is already the worst month on record for flu cases in the Illawarra Shoalhaven Local Health District, with 2452 cases and 10 days of the month to go.
This year there have been 3926 cases of influenza in the region, which is close to the yearly total of 4039 cases recorded in 2019 - the second worst year on record for the flu.
In 2017, which was the worst flu season recorded, there were a total of 4883 cases in the district.
Additionally, NSW Healths most recent Respiratory Surveillance report shows there are thousands of cases of respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) being detected in the state (2,252 cases in the week ending June 11).
This has meant emergency department presentations for bronchiolitis, which is a clinical diagnosis of infants usually associated with RSV, also increased, with 621 presentations for bronchiolitis this week in children aged 0-4 years, up from 519 presentations in the previous week.
Of these presentations, 43 per cent were admitted to hospital, NSW Health said.
Earlier this month, the respiratory clinic run out of Bulli Medical Practice doubled its hours due to the increasing number of people needing to be treated.
GP Julie Blaze said the clinic had been running for the past two years, for staff to treat people with COVID or flu-like symptoms.
"We are always seeing what's going on in the community with febrile illness, kids with coughs and colds and things like that," she said.
"Over the past month, there has been a big uptick in influenza A presentation across the board. The demand is such that we have had to expand it to a morning clinic as well starting later this week."
She said younger children were presenting with a lot of RSV, rhinovirus, parainfluenza virus.
Dr Blaze said her medical practice ran the clinic, which has its own entry point, so that people with likely-contagious respiratory symptoms were not sitting in the waiting room with other patients.
"Staff wear the full PPE, and I think this really makes sense because even in winter pre-COVID our practice would be full of people coughing and spluttering," she said.
"Because of COVID, it's not appropriate for them to have access to the waiting room, so we do this clinic."