"That is a surprise": Doctors still waiting for feared surge of COVID-19 patients in Canadian ICUs

A directions sign is seen at Sunnybrook Hospital in Toronto, Ontario, Canada January 26, 2020.REUTERS/Carlos Osorio

Doctors have been preparing for the worst, a deluge of desperately ill COVID-19 patients who are overwhelming resources and making the necessary decisions about who receives life-saving care.

On the plane to it, many doctors, nurses, and other personnel who run the country’s intensive care units have also feared for their own safety, amid an indisputable shortage of protective equipment. However, it needs to be noted that some critical care physicians in the worst affected provinces say they have yet to deal with that dreaded increase in coronavirus patients.

An important fact to mention is that so far, at least, there are no floods and there are many beds available in the ICU.

The worst could be yet to come

Certainly, critical care physicians are quick to add caveats: that the worst is yet to come, and that even the slow daily buildup of COVID-19 patients, who often spend weeks on a ventilator, could gradually fill ICUs and weigh the system.

And is that the fact that each new critical care patient is treated as a PUI (person under investigation by COVID-19) means that staff must constantly put on protective equipment, a stressful and slow process. In addition, doctors also point out that it is crucial for people to comply with the stay-at-home directives, which they suspect have suppressed the number of patients.

However, the dearth of apocalyptic scenes in Canada’s ICUs seems to offer at least a glimmer of hope, especially after Thursday’s release of the federal government model that predicted 11,000 COVID-19 deaths at best. Although statistics on the total number of people testing positive for the disease vary with the number of tests a province does, the data on seriously ill people admitted to the hospital and ICU appear to offer a more reliable barometer of severity and path of the epidemic.

Doctors say they are not sure why they have not seen more cases, but point to both the massive measures of social distancing at home that are still in place and the cancellation of thousands of elective surgeries that freed up space.

An average of approximately 50 laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 patients per day have been admitted to the hospital in the past week and a half.

Source: Tom Blackwell | National Post