Number of critical ICU cases up by over 50% in some states

KUALA LUMPUR: The increasing number of Covid-19 infections has led to a steady increase in critical cases at intensive care units (ICUS), with usage going up by more than 50% in several states.

Health director-general Tan Sri Dr Noor Hisham Abdullah said ICU usage had increased by more than half in Johor (70%), Perlis (64%) and Kuala Lumpur (59%), while the usage of non-critical ICU beds in Johor and Perak had breached the 100% mark.

He said there were now 132 patients needing ventilators, adding that ventilator usage was at 36%.

Nonetheless, Dr Noor Hisham gave assurance that all state hospitals were coping with the situation.

“This is because most of them have contingency plans to handle the situation if cases rise critically,” he added.

Dr Noor Hisham said of the 168 new variants of concern cases reported from Feb 16-19, 136 were Omicron and 33 were the Delta variant.

To date, there has been 6,537 cases of the Delta variant, Omicron (960), Beta (233) and Alpha (14) in Malaysia.

As for clusters, he said there had been 6,692 clusters with 16 new ones detected, and out of these, 6,206 clusters had ceased, leaving 486 active ones.

Dr Noor Hisham said that of the 27,808 new Covid-19 cases reported on Friday, 103 (0.37%) were in Categories 3, 4 and 5, while 27,705 (99.63%) were in Categories 1 and 2.

Malaysia’s tally of Covid-19 cases to date is at 3,145,174.

There are 233,065 active cases, of which 7,893 patients are hospitalised.

A total of 36 deaths were recorded on Friday, with 11 classified as brought-in-dead.