Declining hospitalizations eliminate out-of-province COVID care

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This article was published 18/07/2021 (1214 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Two months after the first Manitoba COVID-19 patient was airlifted out of province amid overflowing intensive-care units, the unprecedented emergency practice has ended with the safe return of the only remaining patient who was being treated in Ontario.

The virus is no longer the most common reason for patients to be admitted to hospital in Manitoba, and the majority of hospitalized COVID-19 patients aren’t infectious. Now that case counts have declined and more Manitobans are vaccinated, hospitals are closing dedicated COVID-19 beds and opening up surgery slates. Doctors say it’s unlikely the fourth wave will hit as hard — but they’re looking ahead to the potential risk of long-haul COVID-19 patients and transmission in unvaccinated pockets of the province.

Over three weeks in May and June, 57 Manitobans were transported out of province for hospital care because hospitals were overrun with severely ill COVID-19 patients and ran out of staffed beds in which to place them. Only 45 patients returned, with the final patient being brought back Friday. Twelve people died while they were being treated out of province.

Ontario hospitals took in most of the patients, and Alberta and Saskatchewan each accepted two patient transfers. Dr. Jazz Atwal, Manitoba’s deputy chief public health officer, thanked those provinces Monday.

“It was profoundly helpful. We thanked those provinces and we’ll continue to thank those provinces for helping Manitobans out and helping the Manitoba acute care system out when it needed that help,” Atwal said.

Manitoba’s disproportionately high per capita rate of third-wave ICU admissions was unexpected, Atwal said. He said the province is still working on increasing ICU capacity, but other provinces are in the same boat when it comes to trying to boost health-care staffing.

“Obviously it got bad. We ran out of room here. This is what we were talking about on a regular basis, the risks to the acute care system… We’ve always had low ICU capacity. It’s not just Manitoba, I think across the country ICU capacity is limited and there’s a lot of work being done on this since the beginning of the pandemic to try to increase that capacity.”

On Monday, Manitoba announced 37 new COVID-19 cases, and a total of 143 since last Friday. There were 117 COVID-19 patients hospitalized and 27 in the ICU — down from more than 60 in the ICU when the province began airlifting people to Ontario in May.

“It’s a lot more stable, as opposed to frenetic,” said Dr. Anand Kumar, an attending ICU physician in Winnipeg. But, he said, ICU demand is still heavy, particularly as surgeries resume.

The Grace Hospital closed a dedicated COVID-19 ward earlier this month as patient volumes decline, a Shared Health spokesman confirmed Monday. The agency said long-haul COVID-19 patients account for more than one in five cases. There were 12,490 cases of “long COVID” as of July 13, Shared Health said, meaning that in about 21.9 per cent of all cases, patients didn’t recover for more than a month after being infected.

It’s unlikely Manitoba hospitals will be overrun by the virus the way they were in the third wave, said University of Manitoba infectious diseases physician Dr. Amila Heendeniya, but the health-care system now has “a whole bunch of catching up to do.”

“Even though we survived the third wave, we really haven’t increased our capacity in the hospitals. Even though we have been in this pandemic for over a year and a half, we still haven’t increased our actual infrastructure, we haven’t increased our people power, so I think the potential is there. I would say the likelihood is low. I would say possible but not probable that we’ll go into this big of a wave, and I really hope I’m right.”

The province has yet to release updated projections that consider how the more contagious Delta variant is expected to affect Manitoba this fall.

“I know it’s being worked on at the present time, I just don’t have a date on when it’s going to be available,” Atwal said Monday.

Also on Monday, the provincial government said it had received 1,210 applications to a new financial aid program it announced two weeks ago to help nurses who received their training in other countries become certified to work in the field in Manitoba.

katie.may@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @thatkatiemay