Northern Ontario hospitals already seeing record number COVID-19 patients

The latest surge of Omicron cases has reached northern Ontario hospitals as some deal with numbers they've never seen before.

The Sault Area Hospital said it currently has 10 patients admitted who are trying to beat the virus. It's not the highest they've ever had, but they're anticipating more soon.

"It's definitely worrisome," said president and CEO Ila Watson. "These will be challenging days ahead. It's been a long go, as I've said, for people. People are tired, the resilience is low."

Watson said they've been doing what they can to shift resources and deploy staff elsewhere to address shortages.

She said staffing is a challenge for all hospitals right now. It's difficult to provide an exact number because it changes daily.

In the last few days of the holiday break, 70 staff called in sick and 30 have tested positive for COVID-19.

"We are looking daily at our clinical activity in various departments throughout the pandemic," Watson said.

"We've been doing certain services on a virtual basis. We'd either continue or enhance virtual activities, looking at things that could be postponed and keeping a close eye on our human resources, both physicians and staff."

Watson said this has been exhausting for the hospital and people are understandably tired and doing their best, daily, to provide quality care.

"Our critical care capacity is in good shape, of course we have patients in critical care for other reasons," she said. "We still have a reasonable amount of capacity to deal with the surge, as challenging as that might be."

Over in North Bay, it's a similar story where the North Bay Regional Health Centre (NBRHC) has 180 healthcare workers off work.

According to a release sent earlier this week from the hospital, the affected staff have either tested positive for COVID-19 or have been a close contact of someone who is positive.

Capacity limits

It's led to a variety of things such as patients occupying what it calls 'non-traditional' bed spaces due to capacity limits.

Health officials said they will continue to monitor staffing levels and deploy healthcare workers to support the emergency department and inpatient care.

"I know this is not where anyone of us wanted to be at this stage in the pandemic, but we need everyone to help slow the spread," wrote Paul Heinrich, president and CEO of NBRHC.

It's a similar story in Sudbury, where Health Sciences North, is dealing with 30 COVID patients as of Thursday afternoon, a record high for the Ramsey Lake facility.

"It's not the way we would like to begin 2022 but our teams at Health Sciences North -- and all hospitals in the north -- are remaining calm. It's one day at a time," said president and CEO Dominic Giroux.

HSN says it currently has about 21 staff off after they tested positive for COVID-19, and it has another 57 who are isolating because of close contacts.

"What's reassuring at this point in time is that the admissions in intensive care units in the province in relative terms are lower than what we've seen in previous waves," Giroux said.

"At the peak of Wave 3 in the spring, we saw as many as 900 patients in Ontario hospitals admitted in ICUs. Right now we're at about 300 COVID patients in ICUs in Ontario."

"Of course we need help from the public to follow public health guidelines, to get vaccinated and of course if they're eligible to get their third dose of vaccine," he added.

Ontario paused all non-urgent surgeries earlier this week in order to create more capacity in the province's hospitals.