PETALING JAYA, May 9 (Sin Chew Daily) — Doctors in the intensive care units (ICUs) are under pressure as they are battling with increasing number of COVID-19 patients dying.

"We feel helpless. We want to save the patients but the beds are not enough. We are shorthanded too. Many patients die without being admitted into the ICU," wrote Dr Huang Shi Jie on his Facebook.

Sin Chew Daily was given the consent by Dr Huang, who is working as an anesthetist at the ICU at Johor Bahru Hospital, to share his post on Facebook for readers to understand the actual situation at the hospital so that readers would take the pandemic more seriously.

Readers are advised to be extra careful and take preventive measures to avoid getting infected with COVID-19, as the virus has penetrated into the community.

In his post, Dr Huang said he came across many cases of infections from schools. In one of the cases, a family of five were infected, where two of them, both boys, died.

Dr Huang said the head of this family is a headmaster. He was infected in the school first, then his family members. They were arranged to be in different hospitals for quarantine. The eldest son, while waiting to be admitted into a hospital, died at home. The second son died at the ICU in hospital.

The headmaster was himself treated in the ICU. All three of them, his wife, daughter and him were on ventilators.

Dr Huang shared another case of an old couple down with COVID-19 infection at the ICU.

Wearing oxygen masks, both were holding hands as their beds were side by side, as if they were saying goodbye to each other.

In tears, the husband told the wife, "I was the culprit who had caused you to be infected."

In another case, Dr Huang related an old man in an oxygen mask telling his superior: "Doctor, I am afraid I am dying. I can't hold on anymore."

As the ICU was short of beds and overloaded with patients, Dr Huang said they could only move the beds to create more room. The old man died before he was admitted into the ICU.

Dr Huang said there were only five to six COVID-19 patients diagnosed as stage 5 in the ICU in April.

As the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases increased two weeks ago, the number of patients admitted to the ICU spiked too.

From seven beds, the ICU now has 12 beds. The hospital has also set up another ICU to increase the number of beds to 14.

While he was doing his round, he was told the number of ICU beds had to be increased to 18.

"We are giving priority to COVID-19 patients to be warded in ICU by allowing fewer non-COVID-19 patients in ICU," he wrote.

Dr Huang said he and other ICU doctors were overloaded as they were on duty for almost 24 hours.

Doctors were on the verge of collapse due to the heavy workload, but they had to stand in as leave application was frozen.

At the end of his post, Dr Huang wrote: "I need some breathing space and a long break!"