Southland Hospital is once more open to visitors after Covid-19 exposure events in two wards, but overall numbers of people in hospital with the disease in the region continued to rise yesterday.
Visits to patients in Southland’s surgical, and assessment, treatment and rehabilitation wards were temporarily suspended last week.
The doors were reopened yesterday afternoon, but strict infection prevention and control measures were in place, including screening all visitors before they were allowed to enter the hospital.
Although that incident has been resolved, hospital wards in Otago and Southland are experiencing a surge in new cases of Covid-19.
Cases in the region’s wards had dropped from 36 on Friday to 27 on Saturday, but in the past two days they have bounced back again, to 31 on Sunday and 35 yesterday.
Details of the whereabouts of cases were unavailable yesterday, but on Friday cases were present in Lakes, Oamaru, Gore and Dunstan Hospitals, and wards at Dunedin and Southland Hospitals were closing in on their capacity.
The majority of those cases are people who are in hospital for reasons other than having Covid-19.
There were 281 new community cases of Covid-19 reported in the South yesterday, from a national total of 4006 cases.
The seven day rolling average of cases in the region was 419. A week ago it was 553.
The Ministry of Health reported a further 13 people had died who were Covid-19 positive, one of whom was from Southern.
