Health system to come under pressure, warns Tsiodras
It is a “mathematical certainty” that the Greek public health system will come under significant pressure if current trends of coronavirus transmission persist, infectious disease expert Sotiris Tsiodras told an online conference on Friday.
Tsiodras, who is one of the government’s key advisers on the management of the pandemic, warned that while the surge in new cases in previous weeks related mostly to younger adults and teenagers, there have been around 1,000 infections reported in the past seven days among people aged over 55, confirming experts’ fears that the virus is being transmitted to older age groups.
“This means the health system will come under pressure, with mathematical certainty,” he said.
The Athens Medical School professor said that the real number of active cases in Greece right now is estimated to be around three times higher than the official figure of 8,437 and that data show a hospitalization rate of 9.2% among people diagnosed with the novel coronavirus.
The number of patients being treated at the country’s hospitals for Covid-19, meanwhile, is estimated at around 1,000 right now, he said, indicating that if transmission among older age groups keeps rising, this number will also increase exponentially over the coming weeks.
Tsiodras also warned that occupancy at the intensive care Covid wards of Greece’s referral hospitals was already high in the worst affected parts of the country: 100% in Western Macedonia, 46% in Epirus, 61% in Attica, 60% in Thessaloniki and 40% in Thessaly.
