An accelerated rollout of Covid-19 vaccines to frontline healthcare workers is “absolutely crucial” to managing a surging third wave of the pandemic, an intensive care doctor has said.

Prof John Bates, a consultant in intensive care medicine at University Hospital Galway (UHG), said that the vaccination of healthcare workers "cannot happen fast enough" as hospitals deal with rapid increases in people with the virus being admitted to hospital and requiring intensive care.

The number of critically ill people with the virus increased to 109 on Friday, a near fivefold increase in two weeks. There were 19 ICU admissions in a 24-hour period, pushing the number of people in the ICU above 100 for the first time since the the initial wave in April.

Hospital Report

“It is crucial that everybody working in healthcare in the front line gets the vaccine because the last thing we need with a major surge is losing healthcare workers to Covid,” said Prof Bates.

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Immunity

“They need to get it ASAP because it takes a while to have some effect. You get immunity after about seven to 12 days.”

Prof Conor Deasy, clinical director of emergency medicine at Cork University Hospital (CUH), said the public needed to reduce regular activity that may put them at risk so hospitals can cope with the surge in critical care treatment required to manage emergency coronavirus cases and urgent cancer care.

“We are still seeing people falling off ladders and bicycles, and slipping on ice so we need people to be very mindful,” he said, warning that healthcare services were compromised.

Staff shortages were “the greatest challenge” facing the Cork hospital as more than 150 nurses were now out of work because of the virus and it was “all hands on deck” with staff being reassigned to other areas to “fill in the gaps” across hospital services, said Prof Deasy.

CUH is already at capacity in its intensive care unit, while UHG’s specialised six-bed coronavirus ICU is full and the hospital has started moving critically ill coronavirus patients into its main 12-bed ICU.

Challenging

Both hospitals have exceeded the number of coronavirus patients they treated at the peak of the first wave.

“We are in for a very challenging four weeks. We have got light at the end of the tunnel. We are going to get through this but it is going to be extremely hard,” said Prof Deasy.

The hospital would need to “dial down scheduled care needs without putting those patients in any danger” in order to manage the increasing number of critical coronavirus patients, he said.

At the Galway hospital, Prof Bates said that it had capacity to “go beyond doubling its ICU beds” but a shortage of critical care beds would depend on how bad this third wave is.

“It is a constant worry when you see numbers going up as quickly as they are,” he said.