Stretched to the max: Hospitals hoping to see benefits of new COVID measures

The number of COVID-19 patients in Saskatchewan hospitals continues to reach record highs.

Dr. Alex Wong, an infectious disease physician in Regina, joined the Greg Morgan Morning Show on Wednesday to share his thoughts.

Wong says over the last few weeks, the state of hospitals around the province has been getting worse and worse.

“Our critical care capacity is pretty much stretched to the max right now,” he said. “When everything is still going and when you get this huge rush of additional people, it is getting to this point where the system cannot keep up any longer.

“I’m so scared that we’re going to be in a situation in the near future where we might have to ultimately triage and determine who’s going to get, quote unquote, the best ICU level care versus who may not be able to get ICU care or who may get a subpar standard of care.”

Adding hospital beds, implementing a mask mandate and adding a vaccine passport system are recent measures expected to aid the province in the fight against COVID-19.

Premier Scott Moe said Tuesday the state of ICUs is what motivated the government to add the new steps.

“The measures that happened last week were good, they are just not going to take effect for two or three weeks,” Wong said. “Putting some additional measures and restrictions in place in combination with what we did last week is all critically important to help move us away from that really, really scary place.”

With vaccination totals seeing the lowest single-day total in a week on Tuesday, Wong hopes recent measures will reflect a decrease in cases sooner rather than later.

“I would rather be on the wrong side of this fence, hopefully for the last time pushing for stronger measures and being wrong,” he said. “But I don’t want to look back on all of this and see something really, really bad and feel like I didn’t do everything that I could.”

The province has managed to increase ICU beds in hopes of preserving the capacity of the health-care system. In total, the number of beds is to go from 79 to 175.

As of Wednesday morning, there was 262 people with COVID-19 in hospitals around the province, including 54 in intensive care.

Out of the total hospitalizations, 193 people weren’t fully vaccinated.