A Colorado hospital brought back mask mandates as flu hospitalizations surged. Will others follow?

“We’ve really seen an unprecedented year in terms of influenza cases in children at Children’s Hospital Colorado,” said Suchitra Rao, a pediatric infectious diseases specialist at Children’s [and associate professor of pediatrics]. Rao said that across all of the hospital’s different locations, Children’s has had close to 600 hospitalizations so far this flu season, with about 20% of those needing to go to the ICU to receive additional respiratory support.