THREE out of five children in the parallel healthcare system for Covid-19 are in intensive care.
This was revealed by Principal Medical Officer for Institutions Dr Maryam Abdool-Richards speaking at the Prime Minister’s press conference on Saturday.
She said, “We are now seeing children. We have five children in the parallel healthcare system this morning, three out of five are in the intensive care unit (ICU).”
Dr Abdool-Richards said yesterday, 47 patients were awaiting transfer to the parallel healthcare system, 11 for ICU with 42 out of the 47 patients not fully vaccinated.
She said, “Patients are arriving too late to accident and emergency (A&E). On arrival they are considered critically ill or in severe medical condition and in many cases some of them defer.
“They decline transfer, then two days later they arrive into our A&E departments and in this case they have to go onto a ventilator immediately.”
The occupancy levels of Covid-19 patients in hospitals have increased over the past week, which plateaued at under 40% from July to November until last week with a national spike of 48%, the doctor said.
Dr Abdool-Richards said, “We are noticing a 90% and upward trend of unvaccinated persons requiring hospitalisation in the parallel healthcare system.”
She said 92.3% of admissions between July 22 and October 27, 2021 were not fully vaccinated.
Dr Abdool-Richards said occupancy in ICU was at 86% with 61 operational ICU beds with 53 occupied and 43 of these patients have not received a Covid-19 vaccine.
She said some ICU-level patients require 12 to 21 days on a bed.
Dr Abdool-Richards said, “Our team is trying our utmost best, we cannot continue along this path, if we continue along this path despite the adding of ICU beds, ward level beds, increasing ambulances, increasing proportion of advanced ambulances. We will soon run out of these resources.”
