World
- New Cases: 452,985 (⬆︎ 1.06%)
- New Deaths: 5,599 (⬆︎ .49%)
USA
- New Cases: 79,449 (⬆︎ .91%)
- New Deaths: 784 (⬆︎ .34%)
BRUSSELS — Well into Europe's second wave of the coronavirus, so many Belgians are sick or quarantining that there aren't enough police on the streets, teachers in classrooms or medical staff in hospitals.
In some hospitals, doctors and nurses who have tested positive but don’t have symptoms are being asked to keep working, because so many others are out sick with covid-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus. School principals are marshaling secretaries and parent volunteers to replace falling ranks of teachers.
“We have runaway numbers in terms of contamination and a major issue is the risk of the collapse of the hospital system of our country,” the minister-president of Brussels, Rudi Vervoort, said Saturday as he announced a host of new restrictions.
Unlike in the spring, there are enough masks and gowns to go around. But months of preparation haven’t been able to avert a shortage of people. And a decision by the national government to remove a mask mandate and loosen restrictions on social contacts this month contributed to an acceleration of the virus before being largely reversed in hard-hit areas since Friday.
Belgium’s infection rate is second only to the Czech Republic in the European Union and five times higher than in the United States.
The country's testing infrastructure is overloaded. As of this past week, Belgium is no longer testing people without symptoms, even if they may have been exposed.
“The situation is more serious” than in April, Christie Morreale, health minister of the French-speaking region of Belgium, told the RTL broadcaster on Friday. “If you are a nurse and you have a few hours to dedicate in a nursing home or a hospital, if you’re a nursing student, a medical student, an educator, they have need of support.”
This is what it means to be close to a coronavirus “tsunami” — a word used in northern Italy in the spring and deployed this past week by Belgian Health Minister Frank Vandenbroucke, who said that the virus could soon escape authorities’ control.
Vandenbroucke’s statement came before Foreign Minister Sophie Wilmès — who stepped down as prime minister earlier this month — was admitted into an intensive care unit with covid-19 on Wednesday. Wilmès is 45 and otherwise healthy.
“The situation is catastrophic,” said Philippe Devos, an intensive care doctor at the CHC Montlégia Hospital in Liège, the worst-hit Belgian city. “Liège is now is probably the most affected region in the world. We have a lot of doctors and nurses affected. But, starting this week, positive cases were asked to go back to work if they are asymptomatic.”
He said at some hospitals in the city, between one-fifth and one-quarter of the medical staff is sick or quarantining.
“We are in deep,” said Devos, who is also president of the Belgian Association of Medical Unions.
Daily caseloads, already posting records, are expected to double in the coming week, according to Yves Van Laethem, an infectious-disease specialist and spokesman for the country’s official covid-19 response. That means 1 percent of Belgium’s 11 million residents could soon be contagious with an active infection.
For a time, hospital admission rates remained relatively low in Europe’s second wave, providing a measure of comfort. But admissions have shot up rapidly, as infections have passed from younger, healthier people to older people predisposed to severe cases and complications of covid-19.
In Belgium, hospital occupancy is up 87 percent in the past week. If it keeps increasing at that rate, within days it will surpass April peaks, when the country led the world in deaths in proportion to its population. Some Belgian hospitals warn they are already as saturated as during the first wave.
The situation may be especially problematic in intensive care units. Belgium has comfortable ICU capacity for its population, and only a quarter of the country’s intensive care beds are currently occupied by covid-19 patients. But a full team of skilled personnel is needed to keep patients monitored in ICUs. Some hospitals are already warning they may not be able to keep all their ICU beds in operation if their personnel are too sick.
Staff shortages could reduce ICU capacity by more than a quarter, according to projections from Belgian public health researchers, meaning hospitals could reach maximum capacity within weeks.
“March 2020 revisited,” tweeted Marc Noppen, chief executive of the University Hospital of Brussels, one of the biggest hospitals in the Belgian capital, which announced this week that it was expanding its ICU capacity. “ANGRY that we were unable to avoid this predicted scenario.”
Even doctors who are healthy — for now — say they are close to burnout.
“Everyone is just tired. And not only physically exhausted. We are sick and tired of the situation,” said Nicolas Frusch, a pulmonologist at the Libramont Hospital in eastern Belgium.
Belgian nursing homes are also under stress. Seared by the experience of the spring peak, when nursing home residents accounted for two out of every three coronavirus deaths, policymakers pledged to do everything they could to protect nursing homes this time around.
But infections are shooting upward, and deaths are likely to follow. In Belgium’s French-speaking south, the epicenter of the current wave, cases in nursing homes nearly tripled in the last week, to 22 infections per 1,000 residents.
Belgian Defense Minister Ludivine Dedonder said Thursday the country’s military was prepared to deploy 1,500 troops to hospitals and nursing homes to help out, a measure of the strain.
We're not leveling with ourselves. We walk around thinking something will happen out of the blue and we'll be delivered from this horrible thing - whatever "this horrible thing" happens to be at the time.
We seem to think simultaneously that it's always someone's else's problem, and that they have to help themselves, and that it's not going to come and get me, and that if it does I'll be rescued from it because we have people for that.
COVID-19 doesn't give a fuck about any of that.
We were supposed to have learned something last spring when NYC and Italy were being stomped by the monster because the people who were getting sick included the people who were supposed to take care of the people getting sick - plus the people getting sick included the people who make the water run and the lights go on; the people who drive trucks filled with food for the grocery stores and the people who load and unload those trucks; and the people who do all the jobs we depend on them doing so our societal machinery hums along.
It's like we're all playing the part of Prince Prospero, pretending the Red Death will never reach any of us here inside our little pleasure domes.
We've not learned.
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