ICU bed occupancy exceeds 50% in three Covid centers in the capital city

During the last 16 days, daily positivity has registered an increase, and that of the previous four weeks rose by 0.15%.

Santo Domingo, DR

Yesterday, at least three of the leading Covid hospitals of the public health network of Greater Santo Domingo had an occupancy rate of over 50% in their Intensive Care Unit (ICU) beds for the care of patients affected by the virus.

The monitoring report of the National Health Service (SNS) shows that the Francisco Moscoso Puello hospital has an occupancy of 60% of its ICU beds and has 40% of these available; in the Marcelino Velez Santana, the occupancy of spaces for critical patients was 56%, while the Rodolfo de la Cruz Lora maintained 50%.

Those with the lowest occupancy are the Cecanot, which has 75% of its ICU beds, and the Félix María Goico hospital has 67% availability.

However, on a national scale, official monitoring establishes that the general occupancy of Intensive Care beds, which includes the public and private networks, is 36%, with 182 patients admitted; that of regular Covid beds is 23%, with 567 hospitalized patients and the use of ventilators is at 28% occupancy.

Private sector low supply
A high occupancy of ICU beds is also registered in private health centers. The president of the Association of Private Clinics and Hospitals (Andeclip), Rafael Mena, attributes to an increase of patients requiring admission. Still, there are fewer beds for people with the virus because the private sector reduced by more than 50% its supply of beds for Covid, compared to what it had before. This, he explains, is due to the cost of maintaining such an isolation unit and to the fact that the demand for patient care has been reduced.

The same opinion was expressed by the Minister of Public Health, Daniel Rivera, who gave an example that the Clínica Unión Médica in Santiago reduced the number of ICU beds from 35 to 15. However, he acknowledged that a slight increase in the number of positive cases had been observed in the last few days.

LATEST CASES
The reports
Bulletin 400 reported seven deaths and 535 new cases. Since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic in the country, whose first imported case was reported on March 1, 2020, 400 daily epidemiological bulletins have been issued on the virus’s behavior.