Beds at the intensive care unit for coronavirus patients at the St. Luke's Medical Center are full, an official said Wednesday as cases of the respiratory disease continued to increase.

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At the hospital's branch in Taguig City, all 18 ICU beds for patients with COVID-19 are occupied. Eleven ICU beds for coronavirus patients are also full at its Quezon City branch, said St. Luke's chief medical officer Dr. Benjamin Campomanes.

Suspected carriers of the disease stay at emergency rooms that were converted into "transitory ICUs". These are separate from the emergency room for non-coronavirus patients, he said.

Workers who catch the disease are placed on quarantine. When manpower is short, doctors are forced to take over the tasks of nurses, he said.

This creates a gap between the hospital's bed capacity and its "functioning beds" or the actual number of patients it can tend to, Campomanes said.

"We can have a bed capacity of let's say 500, pero ang functioning bed na lang namin is 380 because hindi na namin mabuksan ang ibang wards dahil wala na kaming tao (we can no longer open the other wards because we no longer have workers)," he said.

Watch the doctor's full interview here.

TeleRadyo, July 14, 2020