About 60% of Singapore's Covid-19 ICU beds are occupied; hospitals working on increasing capacity: Janil Puthucheary

SINGAPORE - About 60 per cent of the 219 intensive care unit (ICU) beds reserved for Covid-19 patients are currently occupied, Senior Minister of State for Health Janil Puthucheary told Parliament on Monday (Nov 1).

Delivering an update on the nation's ICU and hospital capacity, Dr Janil said there are currently 130 patients who are critically ill in the ICU.

Some are intubated and require a mechanical ventilator to breathe, and all require the continuous care of an ICU team, he added.

These patients stay for an average of 11 to 15 days in the ICU, and some stay for up to a month.

Dr Janil added that besides Covid-19 cases, there are also non-Covid-19 patients with life-threatening medical conditions that require intensive care, which adds to the sustained load that hospitals here have to bear.

Singapore's public hospitals currently operate about 163 adult ICU beds for non-Covid-19 patients, with an average occupancy of about 80 per cent, he said.

In comparison, Singapore had 298 adult ICU beds in 2019, with an average occupancy rate of 63 per cent.

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"So we have been reducing non-Covid-19 ICU beds, in order to cope with more Covid-19 patients. This is one of the key trade-offs when we increase the number of Covid-19 ICU beds," said Dr Janil.

Adding that the total number of ICU beds has increased to 382 for both Covid-19 and non-Covid-19 patients over the past two months, Dr Janil said: "The need to increase the capacity of our healthcare system is a heavy burden carried by the staff, our healthcare workers."

Acknowledging that ICU staff have been "stretched to their limit" in the past two weeks, he noted that at its highest, there were 171 Covid-19 cases in the ICU.

This situation has begun to ease a little, falling to 130 on Oct 31.

He added: "The booster dose has helped in reducing severe illnesses among vaccinated seniors, but the unvaccinated continue to be at risk. This is why we continue to monitor the situation very closely, especially the number of unvaccinated seniors who get infected."