Let’s hope that the lockdown curtails cases soon or Sydneysiders are about to get a dose of reality unlike anything seen in Australia for a century:
Two major hospitals in western Sydney have been turning coronavirus patients away due to bed shortages.
Paramedics say the city’s healthcare system is buckling under the Delta outbreak, with ambulances forced to drive to multiple hospitals or wait for hours before patients are admitted.
Blacktown Hospital on Wednesday afternoon stopped accepting Covid-19 patients, joining Westmead Hospital which the day before had entered “emergency operations”.
ICU beds are nearly exhausted:
A new pandemic response report has revealed NSW has just 85 active ICU beds left vacant across the state — as rising numbers of Covid-19 patients are admitted into intensive care units.
The NSW Adult Intensive Care Services pandemic response planning report revealed the total number of commissioned adult ICU beds currently available across the state was 592.
On Tuesday, the NSW Government revealed there were 107 Covid patients in ICU facilities, while Deputy Premier John Barilaro said a further 400 hospital patients were also admitted into the specialist care units for other medical reasons as of Monday.
It’s into the tents:
Coronavirus patients in Sydney’s hotspots will be triaged in makeshift units at Westmead and Blacktown hospitals to free up ambulances after paramedics were told to redirect some COVID patients as far as the north shore.
On Thursday Westmead will open short-stay units in the emergency department to manage surging case numbers, after the hospital last week saw 280 COVID-19 patients delivered by ambulance, triggering the hospital’s “code-yellow” alert.
It’s threatening to get into aged care as Psycho Scott dawdles:
The Coalition is facing calls from within its ranks to extend a Covid vaccine mandate for workers in residential aged care to all aged care and disability care workers.
Warren Entsch, the Liberal MP for Leichhardt, raised the issue with the health minister, Greg Hunt, this week, saying the mandate for the residential aged care workforce did not go far enough.
Katie Allen, a doctor before entering federal parliament, also backed the call for the government to consider extending the mandate to home care workers to protect the most vulnerable.
States and territories signed off on a vaccine mandate for the aged care sector in June, but this only applies to workers in residential aged care facilities, covering about 276,000 workers.
According to the Health Services Union, the workforce of carers for the elderly at home accessing care packages is about a third of this size.
National cabinet has discussed mandating vaccines for disability workers – a workforce of about 165,000 – but is yet to come to an agreement, despite the National Disability Insurance Scheme minister, Linda Reynolds, backing the move.
As reported in Guardian Australia on Wednesday, hundreds of aged care centres are lagging in their efforts to vaccinate staff as the deadline for the mandate looms, with about 600 homes yet to vaccinate 50% of their workforce.
Mad Gladys lies on, fact-checked at the ABC:
Day after day, Premier Gladys Berejiklian has defended the severity of Sydney’s COVID-19 restrictions.
“These are the harshest measures any place in Australia has ever faced,” she said during a media conference on July 29, 2021.
Ms Berejiklian repeated the claim on August 5 when she said: “I want to stress this point, that we have the harshest lockdown conditions that any state in Australia has seen”.
Does Sydney have the strictest COVID-19 rules tried anywhere in the country?
Ms Berejiklian’s claim is wrong.
Remember, the Doherty modeling used to justify the reopening assumes 10 Sydney cases and very effective contact tracing to deliver lockdowns only 30% of the time. There are currently 900 cases per day and it is doubling every 13 days with contact tracing gazumped and hospitals brimming as reopening measures are considered.
I sincerely hope that the famed Sydney summer comes to the rescue.
