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After several private health facilities announced the suspension of sampling for the PCR test used to confirm the diagnosis of Covid-19, the vice president of the Chilean Society of Infectious Diseases (Sochinf), Claudia Cortésasked prioritize testing in those cases “that are more urgent”.
By means of a public declaration, the Association of Clinics of Chile reported Tuesday night that “the suspensions and delays in taking PCR tests that have been presented today in different private health providers “it is because”due to high demand in Chile and the world, in the laboratories there would have been a stock breakage of a reagent necessary to carry out the tests “.
After that, the Ministry of Health ruled out that there is a “national stock break”.
“These are specific situations, not officially reported to the Ministry of Health, focusing on private laboratories and representing 15% of the total samples that are processed in the integrated network of laboratories,” the ministry said in a statement.
Given this scenario, Cortés, an infectologist and academic at the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Chile, told Cooperative than “It cannot be that if at some point the tests are finished there will be no new cases and the statistics will cease to have all their reliability.”
“The PCRs that remain available must be allocated to the situations that are most urgent, to people who fall hospitalized, before which we need to be certain of what they have. In general, all hospitals and clinics in Chile are separating patients, “said the doctor.
The specialist noted that in addition “The main producers of the inputs are France, Italy, Korea (South) and China, which are four countries that are highly affected “by the pandemic and” the level of demand is extremely high. “
IMPACTS ON THE CURVE
The health and academic doctor of the University of Chile Mauricio Canals estimates that both this stock break and the high demand in healthcare centers and the increase in infections will “impact with a gap of one week in the ICU, where an increase is already being seen, and with a lag of two weeks, an increase in mortality should be seen “.
“There are several bottlenecks that are important: the first is the diagnosis and the second is the network”, pointed out the expert.
Canals indicated that “the curves are out of phase, do not happen at the same moment, and we are talking about thousands of deceased, just so that people have a perception of risk that they really have to pay attention “to the confinement measures.
“MANY MORE BEDS” WILL BE NEEDED FOR CRITICAL PATIENTS
“It is difficult not to be able to test in order to know what is happening and how the hand is coming, and it is essential to function in a network,” said the Dr. Tomás Regueira, President of the Chilean Society of Intensive Medicine.
In conversation with The Cooperative Journal, maintained that “the pandemic changed character a week ago, increasing the cases progressively and the requirement for intensive care beds,” to which, he explained, “we must do the best management in the macro, manage human resources and technological equipment, And at the micro level, in hospitals, you have to grow in beds. “
He noted that the number of beds is increasing, but also the number of critically ill patients, so occupancy in intensive care units remains at around 90 percent, there is a “local management” to increase availability, but that “has a limit, the physical spaces”, so “the call is to execute the plan that was always thought, which is to open new units outside the units of critically ill patients, to radically increase bed capacity. “
“We are going to need many more (beds),” warned the also head of the Critical Patients Unit of the Las Condes Clinic, in which framework – he valued – “the best possible efforts are being made and it is required, at a macro level, the best possible coordination of the health authority and each health service “.
Likewise, taking as a reference that “hospitals historically operate very independently”, such as the San Juan de Dios, whose plan he highlighted, urged that “It is essential that centers with less elaborate preparation are supervised by the central authority to produce the necessary changes to respond (…) to the entire northern area of Santiago, for example. “
In yesterday’s daily report, the Minsal reported that 604 patients are kept in intensive care units: 494 connected to ventilation, 113 of them in critical condition; There are still 582 respirators available. He warned that in the last 10 days the situation has increased by about 20 new patients every day and that, if this continues, more ventilators will be needed.
