By Saman Indrajith

The country’s health system is on the verge of collapse as the hospitals are bulging at the seams with rapid increasing of COVID-19 patients, immediate future would be very bleak as the health system’s capacity of treating patients is weakened daily, said the JVP on August 19.

The immediate future would be very bleak as the health system’s capacity of treating patients is weakened daily, they said.

Addressing a press conference held at the party headquarters in Pelawatte, JVP politburo member and former Kalutara District MP Dr Nalinda Jayatissa said that time has come to exert pressure on the government to take actions to prevent further deaths.

“We are at the threshold of the worst stage of the pandemic. As at noon today (19), the number of infected in the hospitals have exceeded 45,000 mark. This same situation was experienced in the US, India, Indonesia and Italy at the first wave of the pandemic. Their health systems collapsed as the number of patients exceeded the capacity of those systems. Not only the physical infrastructure including ICUs, oxygen and ventilators but also human resources – the hospital staff members including doctors, are not sufficient to meet the requirement. On the other hand, doctors and nurses are now infected. For example 28 staff members including eight doctors of the Homagama hospital have been infected. Of those eight doctors, four were attached to the ICU. As at Wednesday, 265 staff members including 27 doctors and 105 nurses of the National Hospital in Colombo were among the infected. Since the nursing staff members were infected, the hospital cannot maintain their duty shifts. As per countrywide reports, there were more than 200 doctors and 4,000 nurses infected. Around 40 PHIs and hundreds of para-medics and health supportive service staff members are infected by the virus.

“As of now several health assistant workers and doctors have lost their lives. The situation indicates that the immediate future would be very bleak as the health system’s capacity of treating patients is weakened daily. There are variants of the virus and mutated variants too among us. The government should take immediate action to close this country down. Instead of doing the right thing the government is doing what it wants to do. Even ten parties within the government have asked the President to go for a lockdown. The rulers have their children abroad and may think that nothing happening here would have an impact on them so they keep the country open. We are losing lives that could have been saved. We call on people to go for self-lockdowns without waiting for the government to declare lockdowns,” Dr Jayatissa said.