In the middle of a sunny Sunday morning, the Mayor of Bogotá arrived at the Simón Bolívar Hospital to strictly monitor the management of patients affected by covid-19, as part of the 2 weeks for life challenge against the coronavirus.
The first objective of her visit was to show the field hospital that has been installed for more than five months in the car park of the traditional hospital, where attention is usually given to burn victims not only in Bogotá, but also in the country, and which has been fundamental in decongesting the emergency and hospitalisation services.
"The hospital provided by Idiger, the District Institute for Risk Management, which has a capacity of twenty beds, has been a wonderful transitional solution and has been set aside for the observation of non-covidual patients in the emergency room," said Health Secretary Alejandro Gómez, who accompanied the director of the hospital on the mayor's tour.
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"This is one of the measures we have taken in the midst of the red alert so that the emergency departments do not become congested. Field hospitals, such as Simón Bolívar, help to receive patients, do triage, referral and do not congest the emergency system that we have within the hospitals," said the Mayor, while recalling that Bogotá has made the largest hospital expansion in the country in times of pandemic by going from 935 Intensive Care Units, ICU, to 2280. "More than double that and, so far this year alone, we have reached 125," she said.
Although they have ephemeral architecture, the field hospitals have sufficient facilities and equipment to provide quality care in which, thanks to their rotation capacity, they have been instrumental in improving the response capacity.
Today, the towns of Kennedy, Engativá and Usaquén have field hospitals. In the case of Simón Bolívar, which has made the greatest expansion in ICU, it has twenty beds, three modular units, with nursing and medical stations and on both sides the two wards with sections for men, women and mixed.
Making an invitation to take care of herself, not only in the COVID-19 issue, but also in all kinds of emergencies, since the Simón Bolívar Hospital today registers more people in the emergency department because of no covid, among them 70 burn patients, the mayor finished her visit to the field hospital and went, two blocks away, to a testing station, or covid sampling station, located in the Colegio Cristóbal Colón.
At the testing station, one of the seven active in the north of Bogota, verified the rigorous manner, how the PCR sampling procedure is carried out and recalled that it is an activity that is carried out in different points of the city in a random and free way.
"We are going to take 200 samples and we have already taken 124," she told the head of state, the professional in charge of the post, who has 10 people who carry out the process of surveying interested parties, then fill out a notification form and finally take the sample, the results of which will be known by those interested after three days and virtually.
"There are six thousand positive cases a day that are monitored daily, to verify the evolution of their symptoms," announced the Health Secretary, who added that "home care is provided in 640 homes every day, where samples are taken and for each visit there are two and a half tests. This is how we treat more than 90% of the positive cases in the city, in the homes. We treat thousands of people in their homes, thus avoiding further congestion in the ICUs," he said.
Cristobal Colon testing station
With a new invitation for the thousands of travellers arriving in the city to take all the biosecurity measures, such as travelling with the windows open, always using mouth guards, not eating and arriving directly to their homes, the Mayor of Bogotá ended this morning's tour by verifying the 2 week Challenge to fight the Coronavirus and save more lives.
"Stay at home. Let's continue to take care of ourselves during these two weeks so that, together, we can continue to reduce the spread of the virus," she concluded.
