MANILA, Philippines — Beds dedicated to COVID-19 patients at the Lung Center of the Philippines (LCP) in Quezon City are now 80 percent occupied following the increase in coronavirus cases, the spokesperson of the hospital said Tuesday.
LCP spokesperson Dr. Norberto Francisco said the hospital currently has 105 dedicated beds for COVID-19 patients.
Asked in a CNN Philippines interview about how many of these 105 beds are currently occupied, he said: “85 of them or 80 percent.”
Meanwhile, 84 percent of beds for critical COVID-19 patients at the hospital are currently filled up.
“Out of that 105 beds, we have 56 beds which are capable of handling ICU (intensive care unit) cases, critical care beds, because if you will recall, Lung Center is a referral center for moderate, severe, and critical cases. So of our critical care beds, we are 84 percent occupied. That’s 47 out of 56 beds,” Francisco explained.
Francisco noted that the occupancy in the hospital for COVID-19 patients has been “increasing rapidly” over the past 10 days.
“Slowly over the past few weeks, we’ve seen the occupancy rate to rise again from 30 to 40 to 60 percent, that’s why over the weekend we decided to open a new wing for COVID again,” he said.
He added that even some isolation rooms have been converted into wards to accommodate more patients.
“Yung isolation rooms, these are the big rooms we used to have, we used to put just one COVID patient in there for purposes of isolating them but we cannot do that now,” said Francisco.
“For as long as they are all confirmed positive cases, we now do cohorting, we converted it to a ward which could accommodate two or three beds just to be able to take in more patients,” he added.
Asked about the current situation in the LCP considering this increasing occupancy rate, Francisco said: “We are trying our best, our spirits are still high. We have seen the worst cases last year and we have just reached a little over half of what our worst case scenario was last year.”