Act Now To Ease Burden On Emergency Rooms: Expert

A clinical virologist from the University of Hong Kong, Siddharth Sridhar, on Wednesday urged authorities to ease the burden of emergency medical services, suggesting that medical staff could be sent to care homes to care for elderly Covid patients.

The expert said more should be done to ease the pressure on Accident and Emergency (A&E) departments, which he said are collapsing but still need to take care of non-Covid patients, such as people with strokes and heart attacks, on a daily basis.

One solution to reduce the burden, Sridhar suggested, is to send medical staff to care homes that have outbreaks.

“Elderly [people] aren’t forced to come into A&E departments to seek medical attention. Instead, we’re sending teams out there. That makes life a little bit easier, in terms of the condition at these emergency departments, as well as speeding up appropriate treatments for at-risk elderlies who have mild Covid and of old age in the residential care homes,” he told RTHK.

“Obviously, if there’re people with more severe illness, severe Covid, then they have to come into emergency departments.”

Sridhar welcomed the government’s decision to convert more healthcare facilities to treat coronavirus patients, but warned that doing so may affect the care of other patients.

He also said the city’s top priority at this moment is directing resources to mitigate the strained healthcare system, rather than a citywide testing - which he believed could be more effective if conducted later.

“Because if you do the universal testing now, you would detect tens of thousands or potentially a hundred thousand or more cases, and we simply lack the manpower and logistics to effectively isolate individuals or diagnose by universal testing right now,” he said.

“Going down the line in April when cases are inevitably going to decline, that leaves us relatively free to pursue such universal testing, if we feel that it’s appropriate to clear up cases, detect cases as soon as possible, isolate cases as soon as possible, to really accelerate the decline in cases in the fifth wave.”