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The weekend meant a minor storm in the Malmö emergency room, with a spike of 27 ambulance alarms on suspicion of covid-19 on Sunday. The large outbreak in the infection room also spread to IVA staff and has created additional pressure on other rooms.
Iva staff in both Malmö and Lund have had to make additional passes. But above all, the pressure has mounted on ava, Malmö’s emergency department, where patients who are about to need a ventilator are cared for.
– We have had to take all those patients and there are many, many more than last spring, because now we are trying to prevent them from having intubation and a ventilator for as long as possible, says Hannes Hartman, chief physician of the Malmö emergency department.
The department has faced the pressure and there are spots of attention, but Hannes Hartman has a strong appeal to all Scanians:
– Stay home, don’t go out Christmas shopping!
The pressure of infection in Skåne is only increasing. In the Malmö emergency room, 50 suspected covid cases were isolated on Saturday and 44 on Sunday.
The Operations Manager of the Infection Clinic, Maria Josephson, makes the same call. Both in light of the “very tense situation” and what was shown in infection room 2: many staff members were infected without any symptoms.
– This is how this virus is transmitted. Many of those who are in the Christmas shopping have covid, believe it or not. Therefore, the infection continues to increase enormously, and it is not enough to keep a meter away, he says.
The number of new covid cases in Skåne does not slow down, but the curve continues upwards. In the Malmö emergency room, which is by far the busiest, 50 suspected covid cases were isolated on Saturday and 44 on Sunday.
According to emergency manager Oskar Hammar, 27 ambulance alarms emerged on Sunday on suspicion of covid, the second highest number so far.
The most severely admitted coviditis patients who come to the ER are now cared for in something called intermediate care, the passage through intensive care, with oxygen in high-flow masks and constant monitoring.
At Sus in Malmö, infection room 2 and the emergency department play a key role in that care. There are also staff who are used to seriously ill patients.
When infection 2 was affected by a large outbreak of infection in staff, the number of places was reduced from 19 to 12. The lack of places for intermediate care affected the emergency department.
– Normally we have four of those places, when Covid arrived we increased to ten. And now it spills a little into other rooms, Hannes Hartman says in ava.
– The staff here work hard to maintain the level of care patients need. We are less than we usually are, but we solve that.
It illuminates the infection room, which plays a key role in the care of covid, both with IVA sites and with intermediate sites. “The staff is starting to come back,” says Operations Manager Maria Josephson.
In the infection clinic he has the situation has improved slightly. Ward 2 has been able to open a couple of Covid sites with the help of its own staff and the hospital’s own resource team. And more, for more serious patients, it can open on Wednesday.
Last week, rapid tests, antigen tests were performed on all personnel and only a few cases were found.
– It seems we have the outbreak under control and the staff is beginning to return, says Maria Josephson.
The fact that infection department staff are affected, who are used to protective equipment and extremely careful hand hygiene and fumigation, is perhaps surprising.
– But when the spread of the infection is so great in society, care personnel can also become infected when they go to buy food, says Maria Josephson.
– We see in the rest of Europe, where mouth guards are used, that the infection is also increasing there. Ordinary mouth guards may not be enough, but in cold weather, small droplets form that can move more easily and further.
But during the period when the infection ward was forced to send seriously ill patients to wards with less habit of caring for lung infections, infectious disease physicians have moved in to ensure continuity, Maria Josephson emphasizes.
