A Sydney doctor has issued an alarming prediction that Australia is on the cusp of a “hospital-based disaster,” unless the spread of Omicron is urgently slowed.
His warning was in response to a tweet from a Victorian hospital group, Western Health, which said their emergency departments at three of their public hospitals were “under extreme pressure”.
In NSW, leaked emails from one of Sydney’s largest hospitals, St Vincent’s Hospital showed staff were“While we are trying our best to work around this, we are beginning to run out of options to maintain safe nursing staffing levels,” wrote the executive director, Kevin Luong, in a staff communication email obtained by the“Additionally there is significant concern that there will be a surge in ED activity during the next few days, which may leave us extremely vulnerable and potentially...
“I’m hearing about teams getting completely wiped out essentially because they are either contacts or they are positive. Across Australia, hospital admissions have steadily risen in the past fortnight. As of December 20, there were 824 Covid patients in hospital, with 114 cases in ICU and 54 people on ventilators. That number has now significantly gone up to 2158 hospitalisations, with 171 patients in ICU and 51 people on ventilators as of January 3.
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