Reopening of city could be postponed, Arruda and Mccann admit
As several Montreal hospitals struggle to deal with a shortage of beds and public health authorities investigate a rapid rise in COVID -19 cases in the northeastern sector of the island, a debate is raging about whether Montreal can be ready for the planned reopening of schools and businesses in May.
At the daily COVID-19 news briefing in Quebec City, Quebec’s public health director Horacio Arruda and Health Minister Danielle Mccann repeatedly raised the possibility that Montreal’s reopening, scheduled to begin May 11, may have to be postponed.
“A number of factors could incite us to postpone the reopening of Montreal,” Arruda said. “It’s certain that we must have the capacity to treat people in the hospitals, because obviously as we de-confine we will probably have more cases ... ideally not more deaths.”
Mccann agreed that “Montreal remains a hot zone,” although she said the situation in elderly care facilities has improved “slightly.”
Regular staff members have been coming back to work, she said, and the first of the hundreds of Canadian Forces soldiers requested by the Quebec government began to arrive on Wednesday to help at hard-hit seniors’ residences.
At least six Montreal hospitals were over capacity and had patients waiting on stretchers for 24 to 48 hours as of late Tuesday, including: Maisonneuve-rosemont (115-per-cent capacity), Santa Cabrini (129), Lakeshore (119), Verdun (131), Notre Dame (114) and Royal Victoria (105).
But the president of Quebec’s emergency medicine specialists’ association (ASMUQ), Gilbert Boucher, said those numbers might be deceiving.
He believes Montreal’s health system could be ready to handle a new wave of COVID-19 cases that the opening of primary schools and daycares on May 19 and some businesses on May 11 might bring.
Boucher said the problem is not that hospitals are overrun with COVID -19 patients who need ventilators and other hospital treatment. The problem is the many elderly patients who were admitted after testing positive who do not need hospital care, but cannot be transferred back to long-term care facilities right now.
Only 79 per cent of emergency beds on the Island of Montreal are occupied, a much lower number than in a normal flu season, he said.
The hospitals that are experiencing congestion are seeking new locations, Boucher added, where those who have tested positive but do not require hospital care can be housed as they recover.
For example, Maisonneuve-rosemont, which has 165 COVID-19 patients, will probably soon house some patients in a local hotel to relieve congestion there.
“The de-confinement is not tomorrow. The problem has been identified, the authorities are looking into it and we have confidence they can work it out,” he said, adding that his association agrees with Quebec’s pediatric specialists that schools should be reopened.
The Lakeshore Hospital is dealing with a new outbreak and is reorganizing its containment areas to deal with it, said Guillaume Bérubé of the CIUSSS de l’ouestde-l’île-de-montréal. That hospital has 79 confirmed cases of COVID -19.
“Although the hospital’s occupancy rate is currently over 100 per cent, the emergency situation is not critical at this time. However, we are monitoring the situation closely,” Bérubé said, adding the new mobile hospital inside the Jacques Lemaire Arena in Lasalle will soon relieve the pressure.
The Verdun Hospital, also dealing with a bed shortage, opened its new 34-bed annex Wednesday afternoon, which will be a fully equipped and staffed temporary hospital ward for people who require hospitalization but are awaiting COVID -19 test results.
Non-urgent surgeries requiring hospitalization have been cancelled at the Maisonneuve-rosemont and Santa-cabrini hospitals, according to the CIUSSS de l’estde-l’île-de-montréal.
That decision was made because too many wards in those hospitals have been exposed to the novel coronavirus and because there are not many spaces left for shortterm stays.
Mccann admitted that Montreal’s health-care network was “taken by surprise” by the rapid spread of COVID-19 after travellers returned from the March break. She said other regions of Quebec were able to learn from Montreal’s experience.
Arruda said public health officials will be doing intensive epidemiological analyses over the next few days in the northeastern part of the island. He said he expects that by the end of this week, the number of deaths per day in Montreal CHSLDS will begin to diminish significantly. But he stressed the situation is evolving and the reopening plans may very well have to be postponed.
Montreal reported 324 new cases of COVID-19 on Wednesday, and 39 deaths, bringing total cases to 12,811 and deaths to 1,078.