Covid situation ‘holding up’ in Torrevieja University Hospital

In mid-October Torrevieja Hospital had just seven covid-19 patients on it’s wards, but the situation has radically changed in the last two weeks as the numbers admitted have increased.

In the last two weeks the hospital has since added 30 covid patients to the ward and 5 to the ICU, however, according to one informed reader, the reason for the sudden increase in patients being treated for Covid19 in Torrevieja Hospital is because they have been receiving patients from San Bartolome Hospital to take the pressure off of that hospital.

Until this week and going back to the beginning of September, the hospital was experiencing much lower healthcare pressure than the rest of the regional and reference hospitals in the province but that now seems as though it is beginning to change..

In the city, 80 cases of coronavirus have been confirmed in the last 14 days according to data from the Generalitat dated November 2.

Torrevieja now has a cumulative incidence of 99 cases per one hundred thousand inhabitants, much lower than that registered in many other municipalities where they exceed 300, 400 and 500 cases per one hundred thousand inhabitants, as is the situation in Almoradí, Orihuela (324 cases in the last 14 days) and Callosa de Segura where the situation has forced the adoption of capacity restrictions in commercial and hotel establishments and more difficult mobility than on the coast of the region.

Among the ten municipalities served by the Torrevieja area, those with the worst epidemiological situation are San Miguel de Salinas with more than 265 cases per one hundred thousand inhabitants (16 in the last 14 days in a population of six thousand five hundred residents), Los Montesinos with an incidence of 220 and Pilar de la Horadada with a cumulative incidence of more than 200 cases per one hundred thousand inhabitants. Only Algorfa and Daya Vieja, two of the smallest municipalities of the 27 that the region has, have been free of cases in the last 14 days in the Vega Baja.

However, the situation in the Torrevieja area is far from what was experienced during the first wave, in March-April. Floor 0 of the hospital, on which patients with covid receive assistance, accommodated up to 80 patients in spring – with the rooms doubling up for the first time in the fifteen-year history of the health center -; while the ICU ran out of beds -18 in total- and a second ICU had to be set up in parallel for non-covid cases and beds for postoperative resuscitation.

In that first wave, the Torrevieja health area had to support a higher incidence of cases than the neighboring Orihuela – and had to mourn more than 40 deaths from the pandemic in just two months-.

In recent weeks, however, the reverse has occurred, with it now being the Vega Baja Hospital which has reached its maximum capacity in the ICU in recent days and the introduction of new beds to accommodate patients on the wards.