Hospitals in Waterloo Wellington are starting to see a "downward trend" in the number of patients and staff affected by COVID-19.
A biweekly update provided by local hospitals says there are 122 COVID-19-positive patients in their care, down from 133 on Tuesday. A total of 225 staff are unable to work because of COVID-19. On Tuesday, that number was 257.
"This trend is encouraging however, we do continue to care for more patients than there are beds across Waterloo Wellington," Friday's update said. "This has required our hospitals to transfer patients within and out of the region due to capacity challenges seeing between 10-20 transfers each day this week."
There are 11 available ICU beds across all Waterloo Wellington hospitals as of Friday. However, there is a shortage of 19 medical/surgical beds.
“We are starting to see infection rates coming down in our communities,” Grand River Hospital President and CEO Ron Gagnon said in the update. “This is promising but we are not yet seeing the impact of this reduction in local hospitals to any great extent. Hospital team members continue to work harder than ever during this wave to care for unprecedented volumes of patients who require urgent care within the challenges of COVID-19. We continue to work as hospital partners to monitor volumes and resources with the goal of increasing access to non-urgent care and procedures as soon as possible.”
The update said the St. Mary's Hospital COVID-19 Assessment Clinic has been designated as the referral centre for Paxlovid, an anti-viral drug recently approved for use by Health Canada. The centre will share supply as needed with other health-care providers in the region. Supply of the drug is limited and has been prioritized for high-risk individuals based on recommendations from the Ontario Science Table.
“It is promising to see some new drug therapies being made available to those with COVID for specific groups,“ said Lee Fairclough, the region's COVID-19 lead and president of St. Mary's Hospital. “It is also good to see some reduction in the number of new hospitalizations for COVID in our community, though it is still precarious as we continue to work across Waterloo Wellington and with neighboring regions that remain under significant pressure.”
According to the update, Waterloo Wellington hospitals will be able to start ramping up non-urgent procedures within the next two weeks. Officials said ramping up procedures will be a "slow and gradual process."
Here is a further breakdown of data provided by Waterloo Wellington hospitals.
