The Siriraj Piyamaharajkarun Hospital in Bangkok announced on its Facebook page yesterday (Friday) that all its hospital beds in its intensive care unit (ICU) and in-patient department (IPD) are fully occupied by COVID-19 patients.
The hospital also said that there are still several COVID-19 patients in its emergency ward, who are waiting to be transferred to other hospitals, as it apologised to the public for the inconvenience.
The hospital’s announcement coincides with a warning yesterday from Dr. Nitipat Jiarakul, chief of the Division of the Respiratory Diseases and Tuberculosis at the Faculty of Medicine at Siriraj Hospital, that COVID-19 is staging a comeback, with as many as 20,000-40,000 people being infected each day, about 20 times more than the rate of infection in April.
According to Dr. Nitipat, admissions to hospitals have increased to about 400 a day, from about 20 in April and, of these, 5% are suffering lung infections and half of them have died.
The death toll also surged 20 fold, to about 66 a week now instead of just 4 in April.
Half of those deaths were directly linked to a COVID-19 infection and the other half to a resurgence of comorbidities, such as kidney disease, emphysema and heart diseases.
Meanwhile, Dr. Thira Woratanarat, of the Faculty of Medicine at Chulalongkorn University, said in his Facebook post today that the Omicron XBB.1.5 sub-variant still accounts for 53.8% of new infections in the United States, but the rate is steadily declining as the Omicron XBB.1.16 sub-variant is steadily rising, accounting for 15.1% of all infections, followed by 11.8% by the XBB.1.9.1 sub-variant and 6.1% by XBB.1.9.2.
He disclosed that at least 180 out of over 1,800 medical personnel who attended a conference organised by the US Centres for Disease Control (CDC) in April were found to be infected with COVID-19, because most of them had not worn face masks.
The CDC has issued an advisory for people attending its event in June, asking them to wear their “own high-quality masks and, if possible, to also carry COVID-19 rapid antigen test kits with them.”
