Concerns mounting over hospital capacity
Hospitalizations and deaths are still rising across the country, says chief public health officer
Officials in several Canadian provinces expressed concerns Monday about the health netwwork’s ability to handle a rising tide of COVID-19 cases, with a senior Quebec health official warning that the province could soon face difficult choices about whom to treat.
Dr. Lucie Opatrny, an associate deputy minister in Quebec’s Health Department, said hospitals across the province are at maximum capacity and strugggling to keep up even with can- cer and emergency surgeries.
At a news conference alongside Premier François Legault, she said the network was preparing for the possibility of hav- ing to use its protocol of prio
ritizing access to intensive care — essentially deciding which seriously ill patients get treated first if it becomes impossible to help them all. “It was an exercise we told ourselves was purely hypothetical just a few months ago,” she said, but now it is increasingly likely the protocol will be invvoked in the coming weeksv if trends don’t improve. She said eevery effort would beemade to a avoid that scenario. Canada’s chief public health officer said hospitalizations ga nd deaths are still rising across the country. About 4,336 people wwerewbeing treated in Canadian hos pit alswwdd each day last week, wwwith an average of 811 in intensive care, Dr. Theresa Tam said. “This situation continues to burden local health-care resources, particularly in areas where infection rates are high- est,” she wrote. “These impacts affect everyone, as the healthcare workforce and health system bear a heavy strain, important elective medical procedu res are delayed or postponed, adding to pre-existing backlogs.”