K.H.M.H. Continues to Fight COVID-19 Pandemic

Chandra Cansino

Chief Executive Officer Chandra Cansino assumed leadership of the Karl Heusner Memorial Hospital in mid-October, amid the throes of a third wave of COVID-19 infections.  At the time, the national referral facility was forced to wage war against the pandemic with limited resources, including beds inside the COVID Unit.  Since then, there has been a considerable decrease in the number of hospitalizations.  Nonetheless, C.E.O. Cansino tells News Five that they are still quite vigilant with the advent of the Omicron variant in Belize.

Chandra Cansino, Chief Executive Officer, K.H.M.H.

“It’s been a harrowing experience.  The last thing you want is persons that come into the hospital, you know, they are unable to recover and that has been the most difficult part for me and everybody else that works here and that extends beyond the persons at the COVID Unit.  We have staff at the operating theater that do surgery on these patients that perhaps are COVID positive and so it’s been extremely challenging, extremely sad in a lot of cases but, as I had said previously, we have so many success stories that we don’t always celebrate, so we have to recognize that also there is a positive side to all the work that we do here at the KHMH and try to celebrate those victories with those patients as well. The COVID Unit at this time is, as I’ve mentioned earlier, we are experiencing a dip, I would hope that it’s long-term but we look at it on a day-by-day basis, so from the middle of December we’ve been in the single digits for patients in the COVID Unit.  Today, we have nine patients in the COVID Unit, six of them are positive for COVID.  All of them are mild cases, so we have no one on high-flow oxygen and no one on the ventilators at this time, and the other three are persons under investigation which would be persons that are either suspicious or that maybe have been admitted and are awaiting the results of their PCR test.”