To date, seriously ill coronavirus patients have taken precedence in hospital, but the music is in danger of changing. Belgium evaluates the possibility of ending the fast track for urgent cases from COVID.
The intensive care units, in essence, will once again be open to all those who need them. A project under study, on which we are thinking, and which contains a new further invitation to get vaccinated.
Nothing definite, but very official. The special committee for hospital and transport capacity of the Federal Public Health Service (Sfb Santé), has drawn up a plan to manage any emergency phases. A plan made necessary by the advance of Omicron, the most contagious variant of Covid. Belgium would like to change the paradigm: no longer absolute priority to COVID patients.
Marcel Van der Auwera, head of the Emergency Relief Department of the Federal Public Health Service, reveals that there is a consensus in principle that “in the emergency phase, Covid treatments should not be more prioritized than other treatments”.
The health crisis has reshaped medical policies and hospital organizations. Many diseases and pathologies have no longer been taken care of to cope with the emergency. This is, for example, the case of people undergoing cancer treatments. The pandemic has essentially canceled the right to access to treatment for many categories of patients, and now that there are remedies to avoid all this, in Belgium we are thinking about it.
“It is no longer possible to make so many resources available to one person,” continues Van der Auwera. Words that sound like an invitation to vaccination. The latest available data show that only 46.8% of the adult population has undergone the booster dose, a figure that for the Brussels capital region stops at 26.2%. Furthermore, there are still 77.6% of Belgians who are still only partially immunized. It means that there are about 8.9 million people with the first dose alone, mainly concentrated in Flanders (5.4 million).
There are delays and resistance to treatment with anti-Covid serums, and therefore the medical-health world is thinking about behaving accordingly. There are two kinds of problems. The first is ethical. An attempt is being made to establish the criteria by which to close the doors in the face of Covid patients. The second is political, given that health policies in Belgium are not centralized, but managed at multiple levels, federal, regional and by linguistic community.
It will take some time to understand how and if to proceed, but in the meantime, a very clear signal is being sent. Belgium may revoke priority for Covid sufferers, and others in Europe may be tempted to follow suit.