The Philippine Red Cross (PRC) is rushing the patient capacity expansion of its emergency field hospitals (EFH) at the National Kidney Transplant Institute (NKTI) and Lung Center of the Philippines (LCP), both in Quezon City, as both government treatment facilities are just about to bursting at the seams amid the surge in Covid-19 cases in the National Capital Region.
“We are in a war situation against Covid-19. The health-care system in the NCR plus region is challenged due to the increasing cases of Covid-positive individuals,” said PRC Chairman and CEO Sen. Richard J. Gordon.
“Through the emergency field hospitals of the Red Cross, [we could] help serve more patients needing immediate health care,” he added.
In April 2020, Gordon ordered the deployment of the 100-bed capacity EFH at LCP and a 20-bed capacity counterpart at NKTI in response to the overwhelming volume of people needing hospital admission due to Covid infection.
The EFHs served as extension for LCP and NKTI to handle the increasing demand for beds in hospitals. This helped LCP free bed spaces allowing the admission and treatment of more severe cases in need of immediate hospital care.
The field hospitals are equipped with beds, medical equipment such as oxygen tanks, ECG machine, PPV and Intubation set, Automated External Defibrillator, and other basic ward facilities that will serve mild to moderate cases.
The EFHs are also equipped with air-conditioning units to ensure proper ventilation.
Gordon also said that PRC is ready to deploy more medical tents and EFH if Covid-19 cases continue to increase in the following weeks.
Low lab output
ON Tuesday, the Department of Health (DOH) logged 8,560 additional Covid-19 cases, bringing the total number of infections in the country to 1,676,156.
There were also 7,964 recoveries and 92 deaths.
Of the total number of infections, 4.7 percent (79,016) are active cases, 93.5 percent (1,567,920) have recovered, and 1.74 percent (29,220) has died.
The DOH said 118 duplicates were removed from the total case count. Of these, 114 are recoveries.
Moreover, seven cases previously tagged as recoveries have been validated to be active cases and 29 cases that were previously tagged as recoveries were reclassified as deaths after final validation.
All labs were operational on August 8, 2021, but 13 were not able to submit their data to the Covid-19 Document Repository System.
Based on data in the last 14 days, the 13 non-reporting labs contribute, on average, 2.8 percent of samples tested and 2.8 percent of positive individuals.
The DOH also said that the daily case counts are affected by the output from the laboratories nationwide.
“The relatively low case counts today is due to lower laboratory output last Sunday,” the DOH said.