Ontario’s Minister of Health admits she doesn’t know if the province has peaked in term of case of COVID-19.
Christine Elliott says they are conducting over 9,000 tests a day and that’s skewing things.
“I think we are still waiting to see very carefully what’s happening. Because we are doing more testing, we are also seeing more people being diagnosed with COVID-19. So I think the Chief Medical Officer of Health as well as the people who do the modelling are waiting to see where this is going to settle out.”
Premier Doug Ford “We’ve hit our first target and we are going to keep ramping our efforts until we hit 14,000 tests a day by the end of this month.”
Meantime, the Ford government is freeing up more beds to help hospitals deal with the pandemic.
Christine Elliott says they are adding 1,035 acute care beds and 1,492 critical care beds.
Elliott says the province is also in a position to add another 4,200 beds by April 30th if needed.
The government has also announced they are taking steps to ensure hospitals have the staff available to care for a sudden surge of patients.
The measures include:
-Redeploying surgical nursing staff who can now work with medicine units.
-Sharing highly trained emergency department and intensive care unit nursing staff across units.
-Sharing physician resources across hospitals in a given region.
-Recruiting family doctors to complete shifts within the hospital.
-Recruiting retirees, including nursing and support services.
The province has released statistics on the impact of COVID-19 on hospitals.
As of April 13th, the average hospital occupancy rate was 69.1% (64.1% for acute care only), a significant decrease from 96.2% (97.3% for acute beds) before COVID-19 measures There are over 7,300 acute care beds unoccupied and over 2,000 critical care beds currently available across Ontario.
