Even as Covid-19 cases surge, Singapore’s plans to treat the virus as endemic has not been derailed.
Speaking in Parliament on Monday (4 Oct), Minister of State for Health Janil Puthucheary shared that when the virus becomes endemic, authorities will treat it like any other infectious disease.
In the future, Covid-19 patients will not be isolated from the rest of the patients, and this means hospital beds will no longer need to be set aside for Covid-19.
On Monday (4 Oct), Dr Puthucheary said in Parliament that the current strategy of setting beds aside for Covid-19 patients would no longer be feasible in future.
Instead, as the virus becomes endemic, beds for Covid-19 patients will no longer be separated from the rest of the healthcare facilities.
In an endemic situation, we don’t have influenza beds or dengue beds or chickenpox beds.
Dr Puthucheary added that the needs of Covid-19 patients in hospitals would evolve as they might have other issues such as heart problems, kidney problems, or neurological problems.
In a stabilised state, such needs would be difficult to delineate. Hence, they will relook at strategies after the current surge.
The discussion came about as Dr Puthucheary said bed occupancy in the intensive care unit (ICU) has risen from 26% to 53% in the last 3 months.
This is due to the “exponential rise” in Covid-19 cases recently. With the increasing daily caseload, more have also been hospitalised.
As of 3 Oct, the Ministry of Health (MOH) reported 1,337 Covid-19 hospitalisations. Of these, 250 require oxygen supplementation and 35 are in the ICU.
About 15% of acute public hospital beds are used for about 10% of Covid-19 cases. And about 2% of all patients require oxygen supplementation or ICU care.
Besides that, occupancy of isolation beds increased from 58% to 86% in 3 months, said Dr Puthucheary.
The same is seen at community care facilities (CCFs), where bed occupancy rose from 10% to 35%.
Dr Puthucheary said public hospital A&Es have seen 8 times the usual number of Covid-19 positive patients seeking medical attention.
He acknowledged that this has put a strain on our healthcare system. In the past, authorities would take a maximum of 12 hours from the time of a positive PCR test to convey elderly patients to the hospital.
For the past 2 weeks, the average time taken has increased to between 48 and 72 hours.
But Dr Puthucheary assured authorities are taking action:
Dr Puthucheary said that if need be, more ICU beds can be added on short notice.
Authorities are also keeping an eye on the manpower situation at hospitals after 400 healthcare workers have been infected.
Hospitals will continue to cross-deploy their staff to ensure manpower is sufficient. Additionally, they are working with private healthcare providers to augment manpower.
Moving forward, Dr Puthucheary said more sustainable health protocols are needed to preserve healthcare capacity in case of future waves of infections.
He pointed out that this is why home recovery has been made the default protocol for most.
Singapore has seen over 2,000 daily community cases for almost a week.
Although the high caseloads have put pressure on our healthcare resources, we’re glad that authorities are staying on top of the situation.
Hopefully, we will see the daily cases tapering down and stabilising in due time with the tightened restrictions.
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Featured image adapted from Tan Tock Seng Hospital on Facebook.
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