Tomorrow, Monday November 2, phase 2B of the emergency plan will be rolled out for the hospitals. As a result, there will certainly be enough beds in intensive care, assures the government of Public Health. It thus responds to the alarm cry that there are only 106 available beds.
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In It’s not every day Sunday, the Sunday actuary program on the French-language television channel RTL-TVi, has sounded the alarm bell Philippe Devos, president of the Belgian Association of Arts Syndicates. According to him, there were only 106 more intensive care beds available for the entire country this morning and there is a fifty percent chance that those beds were taken within ten days or even a week.
But Devos does not yet take into account phase 2B of the emergency plan for the hospitals that will be rolled out from tomorrow, Monday 2 November. Phase 2B means that sixty percent of the intensive beds in our country, namely 1,200 of the 2,000 beds, are reserved for covid-19 patients.
On top of that, the country’s general and university hospitals also need to provide extra beds for intensive care for covid patients. This is 40 percent on top of those 2,000 beds, or 800 extra beds. This expansion is possible, for example, by converting a recovery room of an operating theater into a room for covid patients who are mechanically ventilated.
Unnecessary operations have to give way
‘That means that from Monday, Belgium will have 2,800 beds in intensive care,’ assures the cabinet of Minister of Health Frank Vandenbroucke (SP.A). Thus, 2,000 of these would be available for covid-19 patients. The government does admit that unnecessary operations will be postponed as a result.
In phase 2B of the emergency plan, hospitals will also provide 7,200 regular beds for covid patients. If a hospital cannot or can only partially scale up to phase 2B, for example due to a lack of staff, it must notify the competent authority and the health inspection. This may be the case in a number of hospitals, so that the theoretical capacity of 2,000 intensive beds for covid may not (yet) be achieved.
According to the most recent figures from Sciensano, there are 6,497 patients with covid-19 in the hospitals. Of these, 1,160 are in an intensive care unit. In comparison, last week there were only 694.
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