The number of COVID-19 patients at London Health Sciences Center on Monday hit the lowest level in nearly a month, per unofficial LFP tracking.
The number of COVID-19 patients at London Health Sciences Center on Monday hit the lowest level in nearly a month, according to unofficial London Free Press tracking.
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On Monday, LHSC was treating 119 COVID patients, 43 of whom were in hospital for another ailment but also had the virus. That’s down markedly from the most recent prior update of 139 cases overall three days earlier.
It also means LHSC can begin planning how to address the backlog of procedures that has accumulated during the pandemic, a spokesperson said.
“We’ve received an amended directive. . . from the province, which directs us how limited service in specific areas may gradually be resumed,” Carol Young-Ritchie, executive vice-president and chief nursing executive at LHSC, said Monday.
Last week, it was reported the hospital had a backlog of 7,000 surgical procedures that could take several years to address. That staggering figure was announced at the beginning of last week, just as the province began reopening from a weeks-long lockdown.
“We are currently finalizing plans how we can implement these amended directives at LHCS, like we have in previous waves,” Young-Ritchie said. “We are carefully balancing our ability to resume these services with our occupancy pressures and availability of our health human resources.”
She said ramping back up would be done “in as timely a manner as possible,” but hospital officials have to work through the backlog while also maintaining enough capacity to respond to urgent cases and any future COVID spikes.
“We’re happy that (hospitalizations are) going down because that allows us to open up some of the work that had been on hold,” Young-Ritchie said.
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Pediatrics, diagnostic imaging, cancer screening and some of LHSC’s ambulatory care clinics would be the first to get attention, she added.
The London hospital’s intensive care unit was treating 25 COVID patients on Monday, a rate that’s hardly moved up or down for more than a week.
Public-health officials in London and Middlesex County reported two new COVID-19 deaths this weekend and none on Monday, bringing February’s local death toll to 15.
In January, the London area recorded 46 deaths related to the virus, making it the second-deadliest month of the pandemic locally. A week in, February is on pace to surpass that mark as the region continues to battle the highly contagious Omicron variant.
The deadliest month of the pandemic in London-Middlesex was January 2021, when there were 71 fatalities linked to the virus, according to data from Public Health Ontario.
The London area recorded 367 new cases over the three-day period that ended Monday, bringing the total number of active cases to 1,591, though due to testing and tracking limitations the actual number is likely higher.
The most recent Middlesex-London Health Unit figures show 92.8 per cent of people age 12 and older have received one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine, 90.4 per cent have received two doses and 50.1 have received three.
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