Peru once again has its ICUs as full as in the worst moment of the pandemic

Up to 1,553 patients with covid-19 were in critical condition this Friday and on assisted respiration in the ICUs of the different hospitals in Peru, the same number that was registered on August 13, when the record for the occupation of mechanical ventilators by infected was broken of coronavirus.

Lima – The intensive care units (ICU) of Peru have returned this Friday to be as full as in the worst moment of the pandemic, a critical situation that is repeated when the second wave of the covid- 19 is just starting to grow.

Up to 1,553 patients with covid-19 were in critical condition this Friday and on assisted respiration in the ICUs of the different hospitals in Peru, the same number that was registered on August 13, when the record for the occupation of mechanical ventilators by infected was broken of coronavirus.
This was reported by the executive president of the Social Health Security (EsSalud), the former minister Fiorella Molinelli, who pointed out that the national capacity of the UCI is at 90%, but in several regions where the second wave has begun to hit first they are already practically to 100 %.
This is the case of the Alberto Sabogal Hospital, in Callao, the port city near Lima, where the 40 beds of its intensive care units are occupied by covid-19 patients, with no capacity for anyone else at the moment, according to Efe. on a visit to the facilities of this medical center.

“It is very sad to leave patients who cannot enter intensive care or be able to refer them because there are no beds in other hospitals,” intensivist doctor Carmen Zárate, head of the ICU at the Sabogal Hospital, administered by EsSalud, lamented to Efe.

HOSPITALS ON THE LIMIT
In this ICU there were 28 occupied beds at the end of December, but the demand has been growing gradually and the capacity of this unit has increased to the 40 currently existing, all of them occupied by severe cases of covid-19.

The intensivist doctor assured that the ICU under her responsibility is going through a situation similar to that experienced between June, July and August, when the most tense and critical moments of the first wave of the pandemic were experienced.
“Now we see the arrival of patients with greater respiratory distress. They arrive with saturation of 93% and a real need to receive oxygen,” explained Zárate.

Until a few weeks ago, those infected with the coronavirus who arrived at this hospital did not need as much oxygen flow as those now, so doctors could attack the virus more easily and prevent the patient from entering the ICU.
“We are concerned because we can no longer cope. There is a lack of awareness of the population itself. I no longer know if it is really because we are tired of being at home or taking care of ourselves, because it seems that people want to get infected and achieve herd immunity “said the specialist.

MORE INCOME THAN HIGH
For his part, the emergency physician Emanuel Benavente, head of intermediate care and health coordinator of the covid command of the Sabogal Hospital, told Efe that the center is registering more admissions than discharges, which is taking the hospital to the limit of its capacity.
“We are hospitalizing between 16 and 18 patients per shift, while there are about 8 discharges in the same period,” said Herrera.

For this reason, this hospital is increasing its bed capacity by 30% over its offer prior to the pandemic in this first phase of the second wave, with the horizon of growing up to 70% if the severity and incidence of the virus so requires.
“We are in a stage of containment, but we are reaching a point where growth is so fast that the decisions and actions we take have to be just as fast to be able to face this increase,” warned Herrera.

VISIBLE EFFECTS OF THE CHRISTMAS HOLIDAYS
The effects of the second wave are more serious in hospitalizations, since the 1,553 patients who are in the ICU are part of the more than 7,800 people who are hospitalized and under observation.

This is approximately half of the almost 15,000 that came to be in mid-August of last year, but practically 4,000 more than there were at the beginning of December, at the time of the lowest hospital occupancy due to covid-19 in Peru since the first weeks of the pandemic.
That is the direct consequence of the more than 60,000 confirmed symptomatic cases of Covid-19 in the last 30 days, including the first of the British variant of the coronavirus, which circulates without control among the population since the authorities have not yet been able to determine since when it reached its territory.

In total, there are more than one million confirmed symptomatic cases since the beginning of the pandemic in Peru, of which more than 38,500 have died, but the registries of the different regions, which count asymptomatic cases and symptomatic cases without a positive test, exceed the two million infected.

FIRST VACCINES READY TO COLLECT
From the Government, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Elizabeth Astete, announced this Friday in an appearance in Congress that the first of the 38 million vaccines that the Peruvian Executive has agreed to acquire from the Chinese laboratory Sinopharm is now ready to be collected in China .
In addition to Sinopharm, the Peruvian government also reached an agreement to buy 14 million doses from the British laboratory AstraZeneca, which together with the 13.3 million doses it expects to receive from the multilateral initiative, Covax hopes to be able to immunize its entire population of 32.6 million people.
However, Astete indicated that the Executive has not yet lost an agreement that the previous administration of former President Martín Vizcarra had with the US laboratory Pfizer for another 9.9 million doses.