BELGIUM: Just as Belgium emerges from a fourth wave of Covid infections it is bracing for a fifth, spurred by the Omicron variant, with staff at a hospital telling AFP they are already at breaking point.
Doctors and nurses are in a state of “extreme exhaustion,“ said Martial Moonen, head of the infectious diseases service at the public hospital in Liege.
He said his ward, currently holding 70 Covid patients of whom 14 are in intensive care, was struggling with “permanent saturation”.
A patient with severe Covid could fill an intensive care bed for up to four weeks, significantly longer than the three-day average for other conditions at the hospital, he said.
For the 50-year-old specialist, the calculation is brutal: “While you’re treating 15 Covid patients in intensive care for a month, you are preventing between 100 and 150 other people from accessing that care.”
He said temporary reinforcements were no longer available to cover for nurses' absences through illness or burnout.
For those still working, “there is exhaustion, so much exhaustion,“ he said.
The “vast majority” of hospitalised patients are unvaccinated, Moonen said.
“Our aim is obviously to treat everyone in the same way.... But seeing the current situation is due to 15 percent of the population (the proportion of unvaccinated people in the Walloon region served by the hospital), that becomes really difficult.”
Turning to the issue of unvaccinated nurses -- for whom the Belgian government is poised to order mandatory jabs -- he said only “a few people” in his service were in that category.
His staff are contemplating little rest in the coming days, with festivities and family reunions taking place under the lengthening shadow of Omicron.
On Wednesday, the government announced that concert halls, cinemas and other entertainment venues must close from the weekend to combat Omicron.
Prime Minister Alexander De Croo told a media conference that while overall Covid infections were down 60 percent from three weeks ago, three of 10 positive tests were now of the Omicron variant.
“We have to be more careful than ever in this period where there are many uncertainties,“ he said.
Several virologists and epidemiologists in Belgium say they expect a fifth Covid wave within days, leaving little respite as the fourth fades.
The country of 11.5 million people, nestled between France, the Netherlands, Luxembourg and Germany, has recorded 28,000 Covid deaths over the entire pandemic.
Authorities counted a daily average of 8,300 infections over the past week, a drop of a third over the week before.
But that was the Delta chapter of the pandemic. Now, more than 27 percent of new infections are of the Omicron variant, according to eight genetic sequencing labs.
Omicron is expected to become the dominant strain within days, as has already happened in other countries, such as the US, Denmark and Britain.
Omicron is already seen to be far more contagious than Delta, and that alone could be bad news for hospital capacity.
For Moonen, at this point, with Omicron “everything is hypothetical”.
But, he said, “we are still going to try to make sure everyone gets their Christmas holidays”. - AFP
