Dorset County Hospital COVID-19 patients halve in 5 days
Patients at the hospital in Dorchester are now in single figures
Last updated 5th Mar 2021
Dorset County Hopsital bosses say they breathed a sigh of relief earlier this week when the ICU had zero COVID-19 patients.
Cases being treated at the hospital have plummeted in the past week. On Friday 26th February there were 21 patients in the hospital for the condition – that dropped within 5 days to only eight patients.
Alastair Hutchison is the Hospital’s Chief Medical Officer. He said:
“For a large part of last week we had no COVID patients in intensive care.
“From that point of view, there was a feeling of ‘yeah, this is nearly over now’. Of course there is still a degree of anxiety over the new Brazilian variant.
“So that’s always a bit of a concern in the background, but in terms of what we’re seeing here in Dorset I think there is unquestionably a feeling of things now clearly on the way back to some sort of normality for hospital life.”
There’s an expectation that things will only continue to improve thanks to the vaccine rollout. While variants remain a concern, it was announced yesterday that new COVID vaccines to tackle variants will be fast tracked in a similar fashion to the flu vaccine.
Impact of the vaccine
But, Alastair doesn’t think Dorset’s current situation can yet be put down to the vaccine rollout.
He’s basing that on percentages that show over 75-year-olds still make up 57% of patients, compared with around 65% in January.
He added:
“It’s still the combination of lockdown, but also, certainly on a national level people are saying that the number of 80-year-olds being admitted is far smaller than it was, therefore that’s the vaccination.
“I don’t think we can yet see that in our figures.
“You can’t look at the figures and say that the number of elderly patients are going down dramatically as yet.”
Next week, staff at the hospital will be given a second vaccination, although they’ll still need to stick to PPE measures because of the risk of spreading the virus via hand-to-hand contact.
There's hope that now the vaccine rollout is progressing so fast, this may be the last time cases have to come down from such a height.