Quebec to postpone surgeries in preparation for wave of Omicron hospitalizations
CBC
Quebec is planning to postpone surgeries and is requesting support from the Canadian Armed Forces to prepare for an expected spike in hospitalizations due to the Omicron variant.
The goal is to add staff to vaccination centres in order to boost the third-dose campaign.
Part of the plan is to postpone half of scheduled surgeries to free up space in hospitals, which have been decimated by acute staff shortages, according to Radio-Canada.
Some smaller hospital emergency rooms may also have to close to respond to the rise in COVID hospitalizations. Urgent procedures, such as cardiac and cancer-related surgeries, will continue.
Tuesday, Deputy Premier Geneviève Guilbault asked Ottawa for assistance with Quebec's vaccination efforts.
"We are seeing a worrying increase in hospitalizations," Guilbault wrote in a letter addressed to Bill Blair, the federal minister of emergency preparedness, requesting help from the military and any other organization the federal government could deploy, such as the Red Cross.
"One of the measures favoured by our experts to avoid reaching capacity limits is to speed up the vaccination campaign for the third dose and thus reduce the effects of the new variant's contagiousness."
Though Quebec Health Minister Christian Dubé used strong words to describe the province's epidemiological situation in announcing a host of new measures Monday, many front-line workers and experts are asking the province to do more.
Premier François Legault is holding a news conference at 6 p.m. Wednesday and is expected to announce more measures to curb the variant's spread.
"At this point, the trend suggests we will have a much bigger rise in caseload before we see a plateau and if that's the case, it's certainly going to impact our hospitalization capacity in Quebec," said Dr. Patrick Bellemare, who is head of the intensive care unit at Montreal's Sacré-Coeur Hospital.
The current hospital capacity in the province appears to be at its lowest of the COVID-19 pandemic so far.
While public health data shows that in July and August, Quebec hospitals had the capacity to take in 1,780 COVID patients, that number is now at 671.
On Tuesday, there were 415 people in hospital with COVID (not including those in intensive care), and that number has been rising by nearly 20 a day.
"We are eight million people in Quebec. We are at war. We're at war right now against this virus," Dubé said Monday, adding that the province had to close schools, bars, gyms, movie theatres and concert venues in order to protect the health-care system.
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