translated from Spanish: ‘deconversion’ begins from General Hospital in the face of de-discharge from COVID hospitals

The General Hospital of Mexico Eduardo Liceaga, the largest in the country, began its process of deconversion as a COVID-19 hospital, in the face of a sustained discharge of serious and critical patients who have required care and also intubated.
Dr. Guadalupe Guerrero Avendaño, director of the hospital, explained at the daily press conference on Monday that from March 23 they had their first coronavirus patient and the hospital reached their maximum occupancy on May 31, when they had 202 beds occupied.
“From May 31 to date, we have gone on a frank drop in hospital occupancy and today we have already started with hospital deconversion and we have occupied only—well, there are few for us—81 beds with 36 intubated patients and the rest und intubated,” he said.
Of the hospital’s 65 buildings, 45 of them for medical care, they designated six only to care for coronavirus sufferers: an emergency tower, an internal medicine building, the infectology building, the cardiology and pneumology tower, the surgical tower and the pediatric infectology building.
The entire hospital has a thousand 132 beds, of which 227 were converted, which they planned to increase to 300, but it was no longer necessary, as detailed.
The beds that would have originally served for this type of patients were those of cardio-pneumology, which were 70, adding up to 58 observation and 12 intensive care (ICU). The former increased to 168 and intensive care to 67, making a total increase of 324% of the hospital’s bed capacity.
Dr. Guerrero Avendaño said that having converted only part of it, she never stopped caring for patients from other diseases, although the care dropped because for fear of getting infected many people of other things did not go to the hospital, and now they are coming into serious condition.
He also stated that no COVID-19 patient was rejected, explaining that sometimes people were redirected because they did not know which hospital they should go to and reach one of the first or second level of care, when the patient is already serious and what requires is a third-level hospital, such as this one, which is the most specialized level.
Currently, with less than 140 beds occupied, the hospital is already at orange traffic lights and next week it could go yellow. In view of this, the surgical tower, one of six that had been converted, has already returned to normal and no longer cares for coronavirus sufferers.
He also detailed the number of COVID-19 tests that have been done in these months, which were mostly applied to hospital staff: 6 thousand 387 tests in total. Of those, 3,829 went to medical, nursing or technical personnel, where there were 578 positives. While people who came for review were tested, 2,558 tests and 534 tested positive.
The director of the General Hospital, who presumed to be the first woman to hold the position in 115 years, thanked the doctors of all the specialties who also changed their areas to devote themselves to caring for COVID-19 sufferers.
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Original source in Spanish