“I’ve experienced situations where a ward opens at around 9pm, and by 10pm there are already more than 10 patients coming at one go, waiting for me to see them ... I have never had such a depressing call throughout my medical life,” said one medical officer from NCID.
“The wards are designed for infectious diseases ... it’s supposed to be one patient isolated in a single room and so, we tried at first to accommodate this by opening new wards.”
But with patients coming in "non-stop", two or even three patients are now being put in a single room, he said.
The expansion of the home recovery programme also means that the profile of COVID-19 patients admitted to the hospitals has changed, said an NCID medical officer.
“The patients that we're seeing now have much more severe illnesses, with a lot of medical problems, multiple issues on top of COVID-19 and they are also very old,” he said.
“We no longer see any healthy patients with minimal symptoms, which also means that we’re dealing with very complicated cases.”