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The number of Covid-19 patients in hospital overnight surpassed 1,500 for the first time as the health service braces itself for its toughest week yet.
There were 1,525 patients in hospital on Monday with 145 being admitted in the last 24 hours.
The number of people in intensive care units (ICU) has increased to 128 with 19 admissions and four discharges.
Health Service Executive chief operations officer Anne O’Connor said the numbers in hospital will shortly double from the previous peak of 881 which occurred in April.
Some 3,500 HSE staff are off as a result of the pandemic along with 1,000 staff who are missing from nursing homes. They either have Covid-19 or are a close contact of someone who is positive.
This has led to the HSE having to close 600 beds in Irish hospitals because there is not enough staff to man them, Ms O’Connor told Newstalk’s Pat Kenny programme.
Almost 40,000 vaccines were administered last week, mostly to frontline healthcare workers, she revealed.
Vaccination
This week will see the vaccination of all residents and staff in nursing homes with 68,000 vaccines expected to be administered by next Sunday.
However, Ms O’Connor stated that vaccinations are constrained by supply which is currently at 40,000 a week.
This will be ramped up once extra supplies come online but “unfortunately we don’t have visibility on that”.
Ms O’Connor said there is no legal basis to make it mandatory for healthcare workers to get a Covid-19 test on a weekly basis.
When Mr Kenny suggested that it was “crazy stuff” and “unconscionable” that there is not mandatory testing of healthcare workers, Ms O’Connor said: “I personally don’t think it is acceptable. That is currently the position”.
When asked what contingencies are in place if there is a demand on healthcare which means that staff will have to choose between Covid-19 patients as to who gets treatment, she responded by stating that a framework already exists for that developed by medical ethicists.
“Our intensive care clinicians are highly expert at this in terms of deciding how care is provided for people. Thankfully we have not found ourselves in that position yet,” she said.
Pressure on hospitals dealing with growing numbers of Covid-19 patients mounted on Sunday night. Nurses said patients at Letterkenny University Hospital in Donegal – most with some form of respiratory problems – were being treated in seven ambulances outside the facility due to lack of room in the emergency department.
A hospital spokeswoman said it was “an extremely busy weekend” with a “large number of patients presenting with suspect or confirmed Covid-19, many of whom required admission to the hospital”.
The hospital had few beds available, which resulted in delays in admission specifically for patients going to the dedicated Covid-19 zone, the spokeswoman said.
Risk
Immunologist Prof Luke O’Neill said there was a “risk” the number of deaths per day could rise to 100 or higher. The highest daily toll so far was on April 20th when 77 deaths were reported.
He said the Covid situation was a “maelstrom at present” and it was “highly unpredictable”. A small number of large outbreaks in nursing homes could push death rates even higher.
Prof Kingston Mills, director of Trinity College’s Biomedical Sciences Institute, said: “It is inevitable that we are going to see an increase in daily deaths as the daily rate has increased dramatically in the past two to three weeks.
“We won’t see the effect of the daily cases on death rates for 10 to 14 days.”
HSE chief executive Paul Reid expressed concern at the rising trends and said that a new initiative to allow public patients to avail of up to 30 per cent capacity – or about 600 beds – in private hospitals had already been triggered.
However, an association representing doctors in the private sector warned about what it described as the slow pace of vaccination of staff in the independent hospitals.
The Medical and Dental Consultants’ Association said there was no sign of vaccination of staff in the private sector in Dublin or Galway as of yet. It warned if staff in private hospitals became infected and could not go to work, the new agreement with the HSE could fall apart.