The Kaplan Medical Center was forced to close its gates to ambulances due to an overload of patients and a lack of medical staff, many of whom are in quarantine due to exposure to COVID.
Kaplan’s dedicated COVID ward is currently full to capacity with 80 coronavirus patients.
According to several staffers, even when space is made available, the wait for hospitalization can take hours, which is another sign of the system's inability to cope with the huge uptick in patients.
"There was a patient here who waited 12 hours for a hospital bed in the coronavirus ward," said Ronit Ilsar, the head of nursing in Kaplan's Emergency Medicine department.
“The truth is that we have been forgotten. At first they supported us and cheered us on. Today… the public no longer cares about COVID, and we were left with all the work,” she added.
Prof. Stephen Melnik, Director of one of the internal medicine wards at Kaplan, echoed Ilsar’s sentiment.
“Most patients are older, the most ill among them are not vaccinated or those who have not received the third dose of the vaccine and there are also two patients who received a fourth vaccine but fell ill shortly after.”
