With the fourth wave of the COVID-19 pandemic showing no sign of slowing down, positive cases across the island continue to mount, resulting in hospitals far surpassing their bed capacity.

Speaking at last evening’s COVID Conversations, the island’s Chief Medical Officer Dr Jacquiline Bisasor-McKenzie, in providing the weekly update, said that, as of January 19, more than 800 beds are being utilised by COVID patients, well surpassing the designated 700-bed capacity.

“In terms of the seven-day summary for hospitals, we would have started the seven-day on the 14th of January, with 686 cases, and these are both suspected and confirmed cases in hospital,” Bisasor-McKenzie said.

She continued: “And we would have seen that over the seven-day period it would have risen and we are now at 828 cases that are occupying COVID-designated beds.”

The CMO went on to note that, for the past few weeks, bed occupancy stood at 100 per cent, however there were days when the recorded bed occupancy exceeded that amount.

With the current surge, the CMO said hospitals are now under extreme pressure.

“All our hospitals now are being challenged for bed spaces for COVID patients. Many of them are over 100 per cent occupancy. This means that patients with COVID are now occupying other beds… that we would have used for general admissions… .”

Many of the cases admitted over the last two weeks are those of patients who are seriously ill, indicating a worrying increase among this group.

“In terms of seriously ill, we have the moderately ill, the severely ill and the critically ill persons. Most of the increase that we’re seeing are in the moderately ill group, however, over the last couple of days, we would have seen that the critically ill persons are increasing and we are seeing a very sharp uptick in the number of severely ill persons.”

Following this, she noted that, as the moderately and critically ill groups continue to rise, the challenge will not only lie in bed capacity but oxygen supply as well.

“When you go into hospital and someone puts a face mask on you or a nasal catheter, you are usually getting about five to 10 litres of oxygen. When persons go on high-flow nasal oxygen, they are demanding up to 60 litres of oxygen per minute and we can see that the number of patients that are falling into this category has been increasing significantly over the last couple of days,” she said.

A rise in the number of hospitalisations among pregnant women and children has also been observed.

According to Bisasor-McKenize, most of the pregnant women hospitalised are either in their late term, close to their delivery period or are currently in their postpartum period.

She added: “And this is not good because what we have seen is that persons at this particular time in pregnancy, they tend to develop severe COVID.

“We are seeing something new in terms of the increase in the number of children. Proportionally we are not seeing more children than the other age groups. but because the absolute numbers are increasing, then we are certainly being challenged on our paediatric wards right across the island. We are seeing the reports that the paediatric wards are now seeing an increase in the number of cases of COVID in children.”

Bisasor-McKenzie explained that it is highly likely that both the Delta and Omicron variants are circulating within the country.

She stressed that, although declared less-severe, the Omicron variant should not be taken lightly, especially given the rapid rise in hospitalisations across the island.