‘I’m just exhausted’: Inside a Toronto hospital during the Omicron wave of COVID-19 In the acute care unit of the emergency department, Dr.
Olivier Lavagueur scans a computer, surveying the situation. A woman screams in the background. A nurse heads over to check on her.“On my screen, there’s a whole bunch of patients to be seen,” Lavagueur says.“It’s been more difficult to actually get rooms to see our patients because everything is becoming kind of logjammed.”He says they’ve thought about different ways to treat patients who do not have a room.“The question remains: should you try and see them in the hallway or should you try to see them in the ambulances?” Lavagueur says. “That just becomes dangerous because you’re just not doing a good job.” Interactive: Inside COVID’s rehabilitation hospitals Staff are also dealing with patients coming in with both COVID-19 symptoms and other medical problems.If a patient shows symptoms, staff assume they have the virus, but they also take a swab and run an in-hospital PCR test.
Results take about two hours to come back, Casey says, further adding to wait times.And figuring out where to put someone, who, say, has a hernia, but also tests positive is complicated.“It’s very tricky.
It’s a lot of logistics trying to figure out where to send someone because they can’t just go anywhere in the hospital. We have COVID-specific wards,” Lavagueur says.The disease has shown to complicate matters for those coming in for a different medical episode, Lavagueur explains.“It can definitely make everything worse,” he says.