A doctor in the Emergency Room at the Bethesda Regional Health Centre says doctors, nurses, and other staff members are exhausted.

Dr. Hillary Widdifield says COVID is putting immense pressure on our local hospitals.

"The thing that is really keeping our hospitals full right now, are those patients that had to go to the ICU and they are now well enough to be out of the ICU but they are not well enough to go home. Their hospital stays can be quite lengthy, like a number of weeks. In comparison, we might have somebody that comes in with a heart attack and they might be in and out in less than a week."

Listen to the whole interview with Dr. Hillary Widdifield:

Dr. Widdifield says hospitals are filling up quickly. She notes even before COVID-19, the Bethesda Regional Health Centre usually ran close to capacity and they are now bursting at the seams.

"It causes some backlog into the emergency department where patients are admitted but there is no bed for them on the ward and so they stay in the emergency department until a bed becomes available. Unfortunately, this means there are fewer beds for us to see new people in in the emergency department which then increases people's wait times and frustrations."

has been the odd person who we have seen but they tend to have had some other fairly significant health issue like they are on a lot of immunosuppressant therapy, they have some type of cancer which affects their immune system. But, the vast majority of people who we see who get really sick from COVID are not vaccinated at all."