The high contagion rate and spread of the omicron variant in the Canary Islands, which is now present in 87.5% of samples analyzed in the last week of December, is raising all epidemic indicators and putting pressure on the health system not experienced so far during the pandemic, with the highest number of Covid patients in hospitals since it began.
For this reason, the head of Epidemiology and Prevention of the General Directorate of Public Health for the Canary Islands, Amós García, made an appeal on Twitter yesterday for prudence, when verifying "a brutal accumulated incidence rate with rapid growth in the number of cases, most of them mild, but the higher the number of cases and more complicated processes is leading to more hospital admissions and more pressure on Primary Care and the Health Service", he warned.
In fact, Canarian hospitals now have the highest number of Covid patients in wards since the start of the pandemic, a total of 596 as of Sunday, compared to the maximum of 364 admitted from the fifth wave and 356 from the first, in March 2020.
However, the highest number of Covid patients in intensive care units was reached last August, with 108 critically ill patients, compared to 94 that there were last Sunday, which has gone down, but only because people have lost their battle with Covid, and have died.
Faced with this situation, hospitals in Tenerife and Gran Canaria, which are under the most pressure, are applying level 3 of the contingency plan, which limits surgical activity to oncological patients and emergencies to enable ICU beds in operating rooms and resuscitation areas for Covid patients.
HOSPITAL NUMBERS:
In the La Candelaria hospital in Tenerife, there are six wards enabled for Covid patients, and as of yesterday they had 192 people admitted who have the virus and 48 who have tested negative but are still very ill in hospital.
So far this month, between 10 and 22 Covid patients have been admitted to the La Candelaria hospital every day, and at the Hospital Universitario de Canarias (HUC) 13 Covid patients have been admitted on average per day, where there are currently 157 Covid patients, 136 in wards and 21 in ICU, compared to the eleven patients that were there on December 1st.
At the Dr. Negrín hospital in Las Palmas in Gran Canaria there are 78 Covid patients in wards and 24 in ICU. In recent days an average of 7 daily admissions has been registered. While in the Insular Hospital, where the third level of the contingency plan has been in action since last month, there are now 127 covid patients in wards and 17 in ICU.
In the first 10 days of 2022, there have been 259 new hospital admissions in the islands due to Covid, according to the latest epidemic data.
COVID DEATHS HAVE INCREASED:
Another worrying fact is the increase in the number of deaths of people with coronavirus. So far in January, 70 deaths of infected people have been reported on the islands, and yesterday the Ministry of Health reported the death of six people with the virus; four in Tenerife and two in Gran Canaria, aged between 59 and 83 years old.
The President of the Canary Islands Government, Ángel Víctor Torres, acknowledged yesterday that he is concerned about the tremendous saturation that is taking place in Primary Care in the islands, and said that vaccination has cushioned the impact of the sixth wave on healthcare, and that it doesn’t bear thinking about what it would be like if the 80% of responsible citizens hadn’t been vaccinated.
