KUALA LUMPUR, May 18 (Sin Chew Daily) – Due to the increasingly serious outbreak of COVID-19 in the country, hospitals are running out of ICU beds and ventilators, forcing the medical frontliners to make the difficult decisions whom to save first.

Sin Chew Daily had an online interview with Dr Leong Chee Loon, an epidemiologist at Hospital Kuala Lumpur, and another doctor at ICU ward, to get a better picture of the situation at this moment.

Dr Leong said not all ICU beds at Hospital Kuala Lumpur are used for treating COVID-19 patients, but due to the sharp increase of severe COVID-19 cases, adjustments have been made to the existing facilities, and even coronary care unit (CCU) wards have been enlisted to treat severe COVID-19 cases.

"If the situation worsens, we may even have to make use of the high-dependency unit (HDU) beds.

"As we are opening up more ICU beds for COVID-19 patients, we may have to turn operating theaters into non-COVID ICU wards.

"We really don't know where to put the patients if the number of cases keeps going up."

When asked why when there were more than 5,000 new cases reported daily in January but no shortage of ICU beds, Dr Leong explained that most of the cases then involved young migrant workers and therefore we didn't see a sudden surge in ICU patients.

However, he pointed out that the situation now is getting increasingly bad and there are more young patients sent into ICUs now, while more young patients require ventilators to survive.

"We were told last time we shouldn't give up any life, but with so many severely ill patients now, we are facing a tough dilemma."

As such, he said doctors may not provide intubation for patients above the age of 80, treating them with medications instead.