Health workers in Port Elizabeth say the city’s hospitals are swamped — the pandemic has overwhelmed facilities that were already under-equipped and under-resourced.
“A minimum of 70% of our work in the past two weeks has been COVID-19-related,” The Citizen quotes Dave Gardner, head of Gardmed, the largest ambulance company in Eastern Cape province as saying.
Ambulance services in the badly-hit city are facing a rising tsunami of demand. Each day, they find it more difficult to dispatch suspected coronavirus patients to hospitals crippled by staff shortages and lack of beds. “They can’t take them, so we are sitting with them in our ambulances,” Gardner is quoted in the report as saying. “The longest we have waited is four hours,” he complained. “A couple of times in that situation the patient has said: ‘No, take me home’.”
The Eastern Cape has recorded around 18% of South Africa’s 311,049 coronavirus cases, making it the country’s third-worst-affected province. “The hospitals don’t even have space to take serious patients,” said Gardmed road operations manager Eugene Muller. “They are understaffed,” he added. “So they would rather keep the patient with us. At least in our ambulances they are getting care.”
“They are struggling to pump the bodies out quick enough to different funeral homes. Never in my career have I moved bodies around to get patients onto beds.”
Bleary-eyed at the end of a night shift, paramedic Jeanine Jackson said she had declared three patients dead at the scene two days prior. All had called for help with shortness of breath.
[link url="https://citizen.co.za/news/covid-19/2322852/pics-exhausted-paramedics-tell-of-virus-chaos-in-ec-hospitals/"]Full report in The Citizen[/link]