The United States is seeing a significant spike in respiratory illness among children.

Sick kids are crowding emergency rooms in various parts of the country, and some pediatric hospitals say they are running out of beds. But this uptick in illness has largely been due to viruses other than the coronavirus, like RSV, enteroviruses and rhinovirus.

While respiratory infections typically surge in the winter months, experts say that this year the season has started much sooner, and that numbers are unusually high.

"Rates are as high as 25% of those [who have] tested positive for RSV. That is quite unusual for October, we would typically start to see higher rates in November, December and January," said Dr. Ibukun Kalu, a specialist in pediatric infectious diseases at Duke Children's Hospital in Durham, North Carolina.

Kalu said that while respiratory viruses like RSV can be severe in young infants, older children were also beginning to experience severe symptoms that required hospitalization to help with breathing.

When combined with the fact that some children may already have underlying illnesses that require them to receive oxygen at home when they get a viral infection, a hospital system already feeling the strain from the COVID pandemic is once again being slammed with demand for care.