Third covid surge threatens to cripple NI hospitals

With 736 covid-infected patients already in Northern Ireland’s hospitals, and hundreds of staff therefore also having to self isolate, modelling predictions show the worst is yet to come.

Statisticians forecast that the inpatient figure will double by next week, meaning one out of every two patients would have the virus by then.

Health Minister Robin Swann says it means the Health Service is facing ‘huge pressure, like never before’.

“Modelling projections indicate that in the third week in January, hospitals will be trying to contend with double the number of covid positive patients compared to the current position today,” he said.

Dr Anne Kilgallen is Chief Executive of the Western Health Trust, and spoke behalf of the six trust chiefs.

“As a group of chief executives, for Health and Social Care Trusts, we can say that this situation is more grave than it has ever been in the course of this pandemic. I would go so far as to say that our hospitals are facing into an abyss.

“At the moment 1 in 4 of the people in our hospitals have covid-19. It’s about 700 people. At the peak of the first surge, there were 400 people with covid in our hospital, so already we are in a very grave position, and the projections show that this is likely to double by the third week in January.”

The Southern Health Trust is one of the worst hit in NI.

Queues of ambulances waiting to admit patients were pictured at Daisy Hill Hospital in Newry on Sunday night by a local MLA.

Chief Executive of the Trust, Shane Devlin, told us some urgent surgeries in Southern Trust will be axed because of the impending surge: "By the nature of the numbers and the complexity of what we’re staring into, there will be some urgent surgery also turned down. Now that is a really unfortunate and horrible place to be, but obviously we are trying to avoid as much of that as possible."

Meanwhile the South Eastern Health Trust is expecting to reach the peak of the third coronavirus surge in the coming week.

As of Monday morning, there were 69 patients who have tested positive for coronavirus across their hospitals - mostly at the Ulster Hospital but also at Down Hospital and Lagan Valley Hospital. The highest number of Covid positive patients during surge two was 73.

Director of hospital services Dr David Robinson said: “We are expecting to be at worst of this third surge, the worst of the three surges, very soon. We have pressures building in our inpatient wards and in critical care.''