Coronavirus: 7500 ICU beds available if ‘highly unlikely’ outbreak occurs

Health Minister Greg Hunt believes it is now ‘highly unlikely’ that a statewide outbreak of COVID-19 will occur in Australia.

Health Minister Greg Hunt. Picture: AAP

Health Minister Greg Hunt ­believes it is now “highly unlikely” that a statewide outbreak of COVID-19 will occur in Australia, given the success of the nation’s containment model to date.

Mr Hunt said thousands of ­additional intensive care beds could still be made available to coronavirus patients if the rate of ­infection unexpectedly spiked.

“What we’ve developed is rapid response capability,” Mr Hunt said on Monday.

“The best example is what happened in northwest Tasmania. So there was an outbreak and quite a serious outbreak. Tasmania, with commonwealth assistance, ­responded immediately. They ring-fenced the area. That’s actually contained that area and reduced the cases dramatically. It saved lives. And that’s the model that we have for Australia.

“So if there’s a suburban, if there’s a facility-based, or if there’s a regional outbreak, we want those localised rings of containment. It would only be if there was a systemic, statewide outbreak that you would look at reversing. Our belief is that is highly unlikely.”

Prior to the pandemic, there was a nationwide capacity for 2200 ICU beds. That was quickly doubled within Australian hospitals to 4400. On Monday, Mr Hunt said Australia now had ­capacity for 7500 ICU beds, “which can be mobilised if needed”. NSW has the most number of ICU beds at its disposal. Before the first case of COVID-19 was detected in Australia, NSW had 874 ICU beds. By April, the number had risen to almost 1500 as hospitals cleared theatres and repurposed wards.

The nation’s most populous state now has contingency plans in place to increase the numbers of beds to more than 2000 if needed. That would be achieved by using areas usually designated for day surgery, and taking over coronary care and high-dependency units.

Decommissioned hospitals could also be reopened if need be, and construction of half-built new facilities could be fast-tracked.

The last resort option — if a second wave swept across the state and ICU beds were at capacity — would be to construct field hospitals in empty sporting facilities or other large public spaces, an ­option now extremely unlikely to be required given low COVID-19 case numbers.

Queensland normally has 413 ICU beds, or 7.45 per 100,000 people. This capacity would be doubled under the government’s COVID-19 contingency plans. There is currently only one COVID-19 patient in Queensland in ICU.

WA currently has 121 ventilated beds in place in public hospitals, and has the capacity to go to as high as 600 if demand warrants it.

The Victorian Health Minister did not respond to questions from The Australian.