The drastic reduction in the number of serious cases of Covid-19 in Brazil since July last year caused the mass closure of intensive care hospital beds. Faced with the resumption of the rise in the number of cases, the authorities need to be prepared for an eventual increase in demand.
The alert is from the researcher at the Fiocruz Covid-19 Observatory Margareth Portela, who spoke to CNN this Friday morning (14th). In Brazil, there are already at least ten capitals with 60% or more of ICU beds occupied.
“Public managers must start activating their contingency plans, reactivating beds, but, on the other hand, there is no despair of being heading towards the collapse of the health system”, said the researcher when recalling the situation in the first semester of 2021, which required the opening of a box of beds for intensive care.
She says that, at the beginning of the pandemic, states had 400 intensive care beds due to the increase in cases, falling to about 150 after the pandemic entered a downward curve. Today, the number of beds available is just over 30.
“It’s time to pay attention, (cases) are rising”, says Margareth. However, she points out that today the scenario is “much better” than at the height of the pandemic, when there were a much greater number of open beds, but a scenario of discharge of serious cases and the need for hospitalization.
“The denominator that we are working on, in terms of the number of beds, is much lower today than what we had at the critical or cooling moment, around July and August”, she says, but she warns that there may be a resumption of growth of severe cases if there is a very large number of total cases.
In addition, the distribution of beds is not homogeneous across Brazil. There are states with greater capacity to reopen beds than others. “We cannot minimize concerns”, said the researcher, noting that, “in addition to the cases of Ômicron, there is the persistence of the Delta variant and the cases of Influeza, which compete for the same beds”.
Reference: CNN Brasil
