COVID-19 Severe Cases Surge... Hospital Bed Occupancy Rate Exceeds 80%

[Asia Economy Reporter Hyungsoo Park] As the number of severe COVID-19 patients increases, the number of patients unable to be assigned hospital beds is also rising.

According to the Central Disaster and Safety Countermeasure Headquarters (CDSCH) of the Ministry of Health and Welfare on the 12th, the ICU bed occupancy rate was 80.9% as of 5 p.m. the previous day, up 1.9 percentage points from 79.0% the day before. Out of 1,276 beds, 1,031 are in use.

The government is making every effort to expand hospital beds, but the speed of patient occurrence is faster than the rate of bed expansion. At the current pace, there are concerns that COVID-19 severe care beds will be completely saturated by mid-next week.

The ICU bed occupancy rate in the Seoul metropolitan area, where the situation is severe, rose 2.6 percentage points from 83.9% the previous day to 86.5%. Seoul and Incheon recorded ICU bed occupancy rates of 90.6% and 92.4%, respectively. Gyeonggi Province is at 81.4%.

Among non-metropolitan areas, there are no severe care beds left in Gyeongbuk and Gangwon. Sejong can accommodate one more patient, and Daejeon and Chungbuk can each accept two more severe patients. As the number of critically ill patients rapidly increases, the shortage of beds is worsening.

As of midnight on this day, the number of severe COVID-19 patients reached 894, marking a record high. The number of severe patients had remained in the 300s for more than three months since the end of July, but surged after the transition to a phased recovery of daily life on the 1st of last month.

The number of COVID-19 patients waiting for beds in the Seoul metropolitan area as of midnight was 1,739. This increased by 231 from the previous record high of 1,508 the day before. Among them, 658 patients have been waiting for more than one day, 431 for more than two days, and 250 for more than three days.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.