Nearly 400 new Covid-19 hospitalizations over the past day, a 4-month high
Hospitals in the Netherlands admitted 392 patients with Covid-19 between the afternoons of Monday and Tuesday, the most in a single day since December 28. It pushed the total number of admitted patients up for for the third day in a row, with hospital coordinators warning that the coronavirus crisis was nowhere near being over for healthcare workers.
“With this influx, there is a good chance that the number of patients in hospitals will remain high for a long time,” patient coordination office LCPS wrote on Tuesday.
Over the past 24 hours, hospitals nursing wards took on 335 more patients with the coronavirus disease. The intensive care units admitted another 57. Combined, the total was 26 percent above the seven-day average of 310.
There were 2,597 Covid-19 patients being treated in Dutch hospitals on Tuesday, a net rise of 25 after accounting for admissions, discharges and deaths. The regular care wards were caring for 1,777 of them, up 18 in a day, while the ICUs were treating the other 820, a net rise of seven.
The ICU total has remained above 800 for 11 days, and has held above 700 for 26 days straight. Such a high volume of Covid-19 patients in intensive care has not been seen in a year, data from the LCPS showed.
Public health agency RIVM said that a data outage on Monday and Tuesday affected its coronavirus statistics, and had not been resolved by 3:15 p.m. when the day’s data was collated and released to the public. It showed that 5,373 more people tested positive for the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, bringing the seven-day average down to 7,900.
Even with the data error, the moving average was two percent higher than on April 20, when Prime Minister Mark Rutte announced that the Cabinet would take the first step towards releasing lockdown restrictions because a plateau in infections was reached.
The seven-day average has fallen for four consecutive days, but with the RIVM expected to add missing data about new infections over the remaining days this week, it was unclear if figures would continue to decline.