According to Geert Meyfroidt, president of the Belgian Intensive Medicine Association, it will not be long before every hospital in Belgium has to scale up to phase 1A. As a result, certain non-urgent assistance will also have to be postponed. “It will be a tough autumn, more and more beds will have to be reserved for corona patients”, it sounds Monday.
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At the national level, hospitals are currently still in phase 0, which means that 15 percent of beds in intensive care are reserved for COVID-19 patients. Locally, there are already a number of hospitals that have had to scale up to phase 1A, in which a quarter of the beds are reserved for the treatment of corona patients. Phase 1A also means that corona patients can be spread across different hospitals to relieve severely affected hospitals.
However, according to Geert Meyfroidt, hospitals in our country will all have to switch quickly to phase 1A. “If we look at the evolution of the infections and the number of hospital admissions, there is no other way”, he says. “And that will also have major consequences for non-emergency aid. If you have to keep one bed out of four for corona patients, it has a huge impact on a hospital’s planned program. So even then, certain non-urgent care will have to be postponed. ”
The intensivist emphasizes that hospitals are better prepared than in March, but that it will be a more difficult period anyway. “We have of course learned lessons from the first peak and now sound the alarm much earlier,” says Meyfroidt. “But it is clear that we are facing a very tough autumn. The figures will in any case continue to rise for at least another week, only then will we be able to see how well the new measures are being followed up. ”
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