Groningen hospital "technically at code black"

The University Medical Center Groningen (UMCG) uses stricter criteria to decide whether someone will be admitted to intensive care, said Peter van der Voort, Senator and head of the ICU at the hospital, in talk show BEAU on Thursday. "A stricter selection on medical criteria is phase 3A. And from phase 3, it is code black. Technically you can say we are in it," he said.

According to Van der Voort, the hospital does not have space for all the patients who need care. "You notice that the penny drops on 'not admitting to ICU' a little earlier," he said. "There are patients that you would normally give the benefit of the doubt and then say: We're going to try it. And now you're choosing not to try anymore."

Van der Voort said that half of all Dutch ICU beds are occupied by Covid-19 patients. He criticized caretaker Health Minister Hugo de Jonge and Ernst Kuipers of the national acute care network LNAZ. "They say that we can still go to fifteen hundred beds and that until then, there is nothing to worry about. But that is not the practice; in practice, we are already stricter in selecting."