And that means a very tough two weeks ahead for the staff in the KHMH COVID unit. On Saturday, the KHMH almost triggered a national alarm when it announced that the COVID unit had reached its full capacity, and the hospital was implementing its "COVID surge plan." That meant the activation of the Accident and Emergency ward as an extended COVID unit. Incoming A&E cases were then re-routed to an alternate area in the specialist outpatient clinic.
Today, Manzanero discussed this event, and decidedly downplayed the apparent urgency:
Dr. Marvin Manzanero, Director of Health Services
"The reason why the Covid containment area was a little bit unclear in terms of what went out as a press release on Saturday, is because they have 5 adult and 1 pediatric ventilator for the Covid containment unit which is the specific unit. So 2-3 weeks ago when you ask us how many ventilators Karl Heusner have, we said right now its 6. We had no ventilated patient back then. Once you start getting your first ventilated patients then another 6 ventilators were taken from here to be placed at Karl Heusner. Karl Heusner had another 4 and that's adds up to the 16, so what it does is once you have your containment area full, of course you now only have 2, they had 4 on the weekend, so they have 2 and then you had 7-8 patients awaiting results or had been confirm for Covid 19. So thats when you start spreading out beyond what is labeled as the Covid 19 containment area to the other assigned areas that we knew what we were going to do or use once you had gone beyond your 6 patients."
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