Te Waipounamu has the highest weekly Covid-19 hospitalizations in the country – and community services are also feeling the pressure.
If Covid-19 patients needed help from a clinic, it could be because they were having trouble breathing or had become dehydrated, dizzy or nauseated, said Queenstown Medical Center’s Janette Dallas.
The number of cases in South Island communities has started to decline and in the past two days there has been a slight decrease in the number of patients at Christchurch Hospital.
Dallas said she has worn fewer masks in Queenstown than in Christchurch.
She hoped people would change that to help prevent the spread of winter diseases and get through the last winter.
Figures released this week by the Ministry of Health showed that the South Island had the highest number of weekly hospitalizations in the country.
In the past 10 days, Christchurch Hospital has consistently had the highest number of patients of any in the country.
This had led to major delays in normal hospital operations, with many operations cancelled.
At Pegusus Urgent Care in the city, clinical director Jasmine Mackay said her teams were doing well, but it was also a challenging few weeks for them.
The biggest difficulty was the unpredictability of when patients would come in and how many staff would be there to care for them, she said.
“We’re trying to model and predict it, but this year everything is a little different,” she said.
Dallas said the number of patients who came to the clinic doubled in July compared to June.
It was probably a mix of local residents contracting winter sicknesses and the arrival of large numbers of domestic and international tourists heading out during the school holidays.
Some less urgent patients had to wait six hours on the busiest days to see a doctor or nurse.
The clinic was fortunate to have part-time staff who could extend their hours to cope with the influx, she said.
“We are very much back to our pre-2020 numbers and our pre-2020 workforce numbers,” she said.
“And of course we have staff who are sick because of colds, flu and Covid.”
Covid-19 data modeler Michael Plank said it was difficult to say why hospital admissions were higher in the South Island, but it could be because of a higher number of elderly people with Covid or just a slight slowdown compared to the rest of the country.
Still, there was cause for optimism, he said.
“Clearly, our health system is currently under extreme pressure…not just from Covid, but from other winter ailments. But from a Covid point of view, it seems things are now starting to move in the right direction,” he said. .