The surge in Covid-19 cases has caused delays at the King Edward VII Memorial Hospital, according to the deputy chief of emergency.

Roslyn Bascombe-Adams, said the emergency department had seen 150 “known or newly confirmed“ Covid-19 patients in the last 25 days, and safety precautions needed to be used with each one.

Dr Bascombe-Adams said: “Each patient requires staff to wear full personal protective equipment, which has to be carefully put on and taken off each time he or she goes into and out of a room, as well as more intensive cleaning between patients.

“This on its own means it takes longer to see each patient.

“On top of that there are still people needing care for other reasons, and our non-Covid-19 patients have been generally sicker than normal, taking longer for us to diagnose and treat.

“This means that while over the last 25 days we have seen 60 to 70 people per day, which is slightly less than normal, they each take much longer to care for.”

As of Saturday, 37 patients were in hospital - seven of whom were in intensive care.

She said that while not all Covid-19 cases require admission and many are sent home, the number of admissions has tripled because of the recent surge in cases.

"We started with one to three daily Covid-19 admissions, and this has increased to five to nine daily Covid-19 hospital admissions over the past week to ten days,“ Dr Bascombe-Adams said.

“While there have also been daily discharges of Covid-19 success stories, in the past two weeks our admissions have outstripped our discharges, leading to a steady rise in the total number of cases that people see reported in the Government figures each day.

“These have generally been sicker patients requiring high oxygen levels and critical care management.”

Dr Bascombe-Adams added that while BHB has suspended non-urgent, routine surgeries to free up hospital beds, KEMH still has an “unusually high” patient occupancy with non-Covid-19 cases.

“This has created challenges to get admitted patients up to the wards from Emergency,” she said.

"Even when a patient is discharged home, there is a terminal cleaning process that has to take place before a newly admitted patient can be transferred into the room.

“This has resulted in Emergency being burdened at times with an unusually high number of ‘boarders’, something which is hard for the patients waiting and also hampers our ability to manage the less urgent cases with the speed we would typically strive for.”

Dr Bascombe-Adams said all of the hospital’s departments are working together in an effort to develop a better patient management process to improve conditions for everyone.

"We sympathise with relations and friends who cannot accompany their loved ones in Emergency nor visit when they are admitted, except in very special circumstances, but we must minimise the number of people circulating in the hospital for their own safety, our safety and the good of the community as a whole,“ she added.

"We thank you for your understanding with this unfortunate situation.

"Please also appreciate that our staff are also members of the community and are subject to all the pressures experienced by the general public. We therefore carefully balance their needs with our needs in the name of safety for the community as a whole.“

She added: "We need the public to do their part by coming together to protect each other, the hospital, all essential services and the country.

“Get vaccinated and follow all public health precautions, from masking and physical distancing to following the current Stay at Home Regulations. We are all in this together, and we can get through it together.

“Vaccination plus the public health precautions not only protect our only hospital, but it is our path back to connecting with life as we want it to be, from popping to the shops when we want, to going to church, to spending time with friends and relatives, to travelling."