Quebec has two weeks to clear a backlog of COVID-19 patients recovering in Montreal-area hospitals, physicians say, or the city’s health-care facilities won’t be prepared for the reopening of schools and businesses.
Quebec has two weeks to clear a backlog of COVID-19 patients recovering in Montreal-area hospitals, physicians say, or the city’s health-care facilities won’t be prepared for the reopening of schools and businesses.
Hospitals in the Montreal area are currently running out of beds, three weeks after health authorities stopped sending elderly patients back into the province’s long-term care network, where the coronavirus continues to spread and claim dozens of lives each day.
“This is a new problem and it needs to be addressed fast,” said Gilbert Boucher, head of Quebec’s association of emergency medicine specialists.
“There are a certain amount of beds dedicated to COVID-positive patients on the island of Montreal. And those are full. There are still other beds in the hospitals that are empty, but they are fewer and fewer.”
The problem, Boucher said, isn’t an influx of new cases. Hospitalizations have remained stable for several weeks, a point the government has used to declare it has the outbreak under control.
But most of the hospitalized cases are from long-term care centres, known as CHSLDs. Patients who are recovering, and no longer require hospital care, have nowhere else to go because they might still be COVID-positive and the centres are grappling with outbreaks.
‘We need space’
According to the latest figures made available by provincial health officials — which date from May 1 — 4,280 of Montreal’s 6,300 hospital beds were being used. (That includes 880 COVID-19 patients.)
The situation is tighter off the island. In Laval, 486 of 500 hospital beds were being used (86 COVID-19 patients), and in the Montérégie