Fiji hospitals overrun

Ireland Hendry-Tennent, Republished from Newshub:

Fiji is battling a huge outbreak of COVID-19 with 1220 new cases in the past 24 hours and another five deaths over the past four days.

Fiji correspondent Lice Movono told The AM Show things are going “from bad to worse” for the island nation. 

“We’ve had 9468 cases in the last two weeks alone. In the entire month of July we have managed to double the cases from the rest of the pandemic. 

“We’ve also managed to double the death toll from the rest of the pandemic in the last two weeks. So July is looking like a really horrible month.”

Movono said thankfully there has been an influx of Australian and New Zealand medical staff to help manage the outbreak. But she says hospitals and managed isolation facilities are overrun. 

“Unfortunately we now have about 3000 people who are isolating in their own homes because the Government is no longer able to quarantine all positive cases so they can now only look after those who are severe and critical.  

“That means that our… main hospital is a COVID care facility only and [it’s] inundated so a lot of non-COVID critical care has been distributed outside of that hospital.” 

She said a ship and two sports stadiums have been converted into temporary medical facilities. Movono says unfortunately officials don’t think Fiji has hit its peak in cases yet. 

The new deaths bring Fiji’s death toll to 74. All of the recent deaths were people who were in their 60s and 70s and unvaccinated.