HEALTH Minister Renward Wells said officials are looking for ways to add more bed space to the public health sector as the system continues to be challenged with capacity due to increasing COVID-19 hospital admissions, which jumped to a record breaking 191 as of Monday.

This is the highest tally of hospital cases since the start of the pandemic.

Of the 191 cases in hospital, 176 are moderately ill while 15 are in the intensive care unit.  Yesterday, the Ministry of Health added seven new COVID related deaths to the nation’s toll, which means 453 people have now died from the virus

Mr Wells said officials are closely monitoring the situation and plan to increase bed capacity through makeshift arrangements if the surge worsens.

“We are challenged but we are looking at a quick and rapid way to deploy beds as needed,” he said before going to a Cabinet meeting yesterday.

“We have some tents that (were) donated to us by the United States government that can be very quickly augmented to be able to assist in whether it’s a hurricane, natural disasters, emergencies or pandemics that we can outfit them very quickly to be medical facilities.

“Obviously we’re looking at it because in this particular instance, those tents, they do not have negative air pressure, so the engineers are looking as to how we can get negative air pressures inside of those tents in the event that we do have another surge or circumstance where we end up with more cases of COVID going forward.

“But, I’m truly praying and hoping that based on the measures that we would have put in place during the second wave when we didn’t have vaccines that helped us to bend the curve and flatten the curve of COVID and we continue with those measures and we will begin to see some results.

“There’s usually an up and down circumstance taking place now. Some days, you see it’s below 100 and some days it’s above but we are looking at a potential downward trend and hopefully it continues in that direction.”

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