On 1 April last year, 325 patients were admitted with covid-19 to Norwegian hospitals. This is currently the highest number during the entire pandemic.
In the days that followed, the hospital numbers dropped considerably at that time. Now the number is once again on its way up to the same heights.
– The situation is serious and demanding for health personnel in the hospitals and in the municipalities. We have not had higher hospital admissions since April last year, and the number of hospital admissions is still rising, says health director Bjørn Guldvog to NTB.
– During Easter, between 25 and 40 new patients have been admitted every day, he adds.
Of the 306 corona patients now admitted, 64 of them receive ventilator treatment. There is one more than the day before, according to The Norwegian Directorate of Health’s overview Saturday.
268 of the corona patients are hospitalized in the Health South-East region, 25 are hospitalized in Health West, nine are hospitalized in Central Norway, and four are hospitalized in Health North.
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Hope the measures bring the numbers down
The Ministry of Health and Care Services points out that the English virus variant, which is now the dominant one in Norway, is not only more contagious. It also leads to more serious illness and thus more hospital admissions, State Secretary Saliba Andreas Korkunc (H) informs NTB.
– On March 25, the government introduced stricter national measures to prevent the infection from spreading to areas in the country with little infection. In addition, there are very strict measures in the areas with the highest infection, such as in Oslo and Viken, he says in a written statement.
– Hopefully the measures will ensure that the number of hospital admissions soon decreases, Korkunc continues.
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Infection rates are declining somewhat
And while hospital admissions are rising, national infection rates are declining. In the last 24 hours, 640 new corona infections have been registered in the country, which is 432 fewer than a week ago. Health Director Bjørn Guldvog believes we can thus also see the falling numbers of corona inmates in the time to come.
– Those who are admitted to hospital have often been infected one to three weeks earlier. We can therefore hope that the hospitalization numbers will fall somewhat in the next two weeks if the infection rates continue to decline, he says.
Chief physician Preben Aavitsland at the National Institute of Public Health (NIPH) also believes that the high numbers of inpatients do not mean that the situation necessarily develops in the wrong direction. He emphasizes to NTB that in recent times there has actually been a decline in the number of new admissions.
– In week eleven we reached the top with 224 new admissions, in week twelve it was 197. This week we are currently at 104, and end up probably at around 150, he says.
– The number of new admissions decreases a couple of weeks after the number of new infected decreases. It is therefore fitting that we now see declining hospitalization numbers, he adds.
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Easter factor
Aavitsland also points to the possibility that Easter may have something to do with people staying longer in hospital.
– It is not so easy to discharge patients at Easter when there is a holiday break in some of the municipal services that will take over the follow-up of the discharged patients, says the FHI superior.
The decrease in the number of cases of infection may also be related to less testing at Easter. But in Bergen, infection rates are going up, despite lower test activity during the Easter holidays, which worries the municipality.
In Oslo, where infection rates have been high recently, the number of new cases is somewhat lower than they have been recently. On Saturday, 228 new infections were registered, 16 below the average the previous week.
Since February last year, 97,410 people have been diagnosed with corona infection in this country. At the same time, vaccination is constantly advancing, and now almost 700,000 Norwegians have received the first vaccine dose. Nearly 300,000 have also received their second dose.
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