Planning for a Respiratory Season You Can’t Predict

When you build to the forecasted case, you’re optimized for one outcome. When the season diverges from the forecast, the plan can break when you need it to hold.

Instead of optimizing for the most likely outcome, variability-driven planning builds capacity for the range of outcomes. Some seasons you’ll over-prepare, ensuring you’re not caught short when it matters most.

The case for this shift is stronger than it was even two years ago because respiratory viruses no longer take turns the way they used to. Flu, RSV, and COVID-19 overlap rather than peak sequentially. Emerging risks add planning variables that seasonal forecasts weren’t designed to address.

The most resilient facilities heading into last winter were the ones whose planning was built for variability.

Four steps that can help produce a plan that holds up.

Assess

Effective planning starts with your facility, not the national picture. Peak-week PPE usage from 2025–2026 tells you more than seasonal totals. Patient mix, geographic risk, and where the pressure showed up last year shape what you actually need. Your supply chain, infection prevention, and clinical teams already hold most of this picture. Pulling it together in one place is the foundation for everything else in the framework, providing a picture of what your facility actually needs, based on what you saw, not what national averages suggest you should have seen.

Buffer

Historical CDC surveillance shows flu activity typically peaks between December and February, with elevated activity extending across the fall and winter.

Replace fixed targets with inventory bands. A minimum that covers a moderate season. A target that covers a high-severity season. A surge ceiling that covers a high-severity season with co-circulation. Historical CDC surveillance shows that flu activity typically peaks between December and February, with elevated activity extending across the fall and winter⁴. The CDC NIOSH framework for PPE conservation — conventional, contingency, and crisis capacity — remains the standard for thinking about each band⁵. The NIOSH PPE Burn Rate Calculator is a free, practical tool for translating those bands into facility-specific numbers⁵.

Diversify

Diversify across PPE product categories — N95s, surgical masks, gowns, gloves, eye protection — so a shortage in one category doesn’t cascade across your operations. And pay close attention to where your PPE is made. Geographic concentration of manufacturing, particularly a heavy reliance on overseas production, is a risk in itself because, as of January 2026, tariffs on disposable textile face masks are 50% and on medical and surgical rubber gloves are 100%⁶. Manufacturers with Americas-based production, including HALYARD*, offer insulation against that exposure.

Monitor

The right data, watched at the right cadence, turns surprise into timely action. Few facilities have the bandwidth to watch all of this in-house, and they shouldn’t have to. A strong supply partner can read these signals on your behalf and tell you what’s shifting, what it means for demand, and when to adjust your buffer.

Our focus through 2026–2027 is on what’s actually happening, not what’s predicted. Forecasts will come, and we’ll read them carefully. The respiratory landscape will keep shifting through the fall and winter, and the picture in November will look different from the picture in August. Throughout the season, we’ll track changes from trusted sources and share what we’re seeing to support facility-level planning.

The 2025–2026 season didn’t break the forecast. It just reminded us that a national outlook and a hospital supply room are measuring different things, and the plan that holds up is the one built for both.

We are here to help facilities think through what PPE planning looks like for their specific operations. To talk through a facility-specific PPE forecast for the 2026–2027 season, contact a HALYARD* Representative.