Jarvis: On call in Windsor

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There were only nine patients with COVID-19 in Windsor Regional Hospital on Friday.

Yet, starting Monday, elective surgery will be cancelled, for the third time in the last year.

We’re not preparing for a surge here. It’s to accommodate patients from Toronto, Ottawa and other cities where cases are soaring.

Like the third lockdown announced last week and the second stay-at-home order this week, largely to check runaway spread in other regions, Ontario’s edict cancelling elective surgeries will be bitter news to people whose procedures are postponed, God forbid, a second or third time.

But here’s why we have to do this.

On Tuesday, there were 1,417 COVID-19 patients in Ontario hospitals. By April 18, only nine days from now, there are projected to be more than 2,000. By April 30, almost 2,900.

At the peak of the devastating second wave, there were 421 COVID-19 patients in intensive care in Ontario. On Friday, there were 541. In nine days, there are projected to be up to 700. By April 30, even with the stay-at-home order, there are projected to be 774 COVID-19 patients in ICUs. If we don’t follow the stay-at-home order, that number will be almost 1,000.

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And so far, the projections by the province’s COVID-19 science table have been strikingly accurate.

Some hospitals won’t have enough beds, period. Even more won’t have enough ICU beds. And Level 3 ICU beds, for the most critically ill? Many more patients in this third wave, hit by highly contagious and more deadly virus variants, need these beds. But only about half a dozen hospitals will have enough.

Windsor is one of them.

Some hospitals in the GTA are already out of beds, equipment and staff.

In short, Windsor may be OK, but in Ontario, it’s dire, far more dire than the second wave.

Said Windsor Regional chief of staff Dr. Wassim Saad at a news conference Friday, “Patients’ lives are at risk.”

And Windsor Regional is part of a provincial health care system.

When Ontario called for critical care centres to create 500 more critical care beds as COVID-19 cases skyrocketed in January, Windsor Regional stepped up with 30. That’s six per cent of the additional beds from a hospital in a region with three per cent of the population. All of these 500 extra beds were available for patients of any hospital that needs them.

Ontario isn’t spending $2 billion to build a new hospital here just for the city and county. We are part of the province’s network of trauma and critical care centres.

Similarly, when people in Windsor and Essex County need highly specialized care that isn’t available here, there are beds for them in London or Toronto. We know that only too well. When we couldn’t accommodate all of our COVID-19 patients here last year, we transferred about 20 patients to other hospitals to free up beds here.

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Now, when other hospitals need our help, will we refuse, Windsor Regional CEO David Musyj asked at the news conference. No, we will not. We will help, just like they helped us last year. It’s payback time.

And if our beds fill up again, other hospitals will take our patients, again.

About 6,000 procedures here have been cancelled during the pandemic. Some are eye procedures that can be done elsewhere. But this will increase the backlog. Saad had estimated that, operating at up to 130 per cent of capacity, it will take 18 months to catch up. Now, whatever progress has been made will be lost again. But, as Musyj said, this is a crisis. We have to respond to the immediate need.

You could question whether Canada funds enough acute care beds (we fund fewer per capita than at least six peer countries) and whether our hospitals are forced to operate too close to capacity.

But the second wave hadn’t even ended in Ontario before the third wave began. Many hospitals still had patients from the second wave who hadn’t fully recovered and couldn’t be discharged, compromising the normal surge capacity, said Musyj. It’s a pandemic on top of a pandemic.

Finally, are we really willing to gamble, despite the better projections for us, that we won’t need these beds for our own COVID-19 patients? Our cases are also rising. New infections jumped to 70 on Friday. Outbreaks rose to eight. Students are being dismissed from schools all over the place. There have now been 215 cases of virus variants, and that number is rising rapidly. Another person has died.

It’s not just the elderly, as if that’s somehow not as bad. Four of the nine COVID-19 patients in the ICU here now range in age from their 30s to their 50s.

In the race between the virus and the vaccine, right now, the virus is winning.

ajarvis@postmedia.com