Dr. Cuellar’s Warning on COVID Death Comes to Past
Fernando Cuellar
Doctor Fernando Cuellar, who works in the private sector as an internist at the Belize Medical Associates, has been vocal in expressing concern about the saturation of our healthcare system with COVID-19 patients. With the infection rate nearing a tipping point, there is serious worry that the human resources, in terms of frontline staff are being stretched thin in the private and public sectors. While he did not necessarily presage Jimenez’s death, Doctor Cuellar spoke about these very tragic scenarios when we interviewed him last Thursday.
Dr. Fernando Cuellar, Internist, Belize Medical Associates [File: November 26th, 2020]
“Our healthcare system or hospitals is now overwhelmed. It’s not getting overwhelmed. We’ve passed the saturation point, we’ve passed the limit. We are strained and that refers to both public and private and public means the regional hospitals and of course the flagship being Karl Heusner. So we are overwhelmed in terms of, we don’t have enough physical spaces, we don’t have enough ventilators, we don’t have enough blood/gas machines, we don’t have enough medication and importantly and perhaps most importantly the human resources are being depleted. A lot of nurses now have, a lot of them are in quarantine, they do long hours. The patient/nurse ratio is very stretched, the doctors are overworked. So definitely, the human resources is one of the most important things that is or has become overwhelmed. So my message was for the Belizean people, for them to realize that we eena trouble okay, we eena deep doo-doo and we need to bear that in mind so that we can do something so as the numbers so that we can fight the virus.”
