Daniel Andrews announced $1.3 billion for the growth of the state’s intensive care units in Victoria, the biggest expansion of Victoria’s intensive care capacity in the state’s history.
Victoria’s Health Minister Jenny Mikakos said that the expansion is for “worse case scenario planning” which she hopes the state never needs to use. There are currently 450, about 500, intensive care beds in Victoria. Another 4,000 intensive care beds will be funded, which will take the total to 4,500 beds.
The package will pay for capital funding to create new spaces for intensive care beds at the Alfred, Monash and Austin Hospitals. Furthermore, a large part of the funding will be for equipment, including personal protective equipment needed as the coronavirus crisis continues.
Premier Andrews said that if people are not careful, the virus will spread more rapidly causing the state’s health system to be overrun resulting in many patients unable to get the help they need to be kept alive. “If this gets away from us, the $1.3 billion I’m announcing today, the $500 million we announced last week, that will be nowhere near enough,” he said. “There will be nowhere near enough intensive care beds if this gets away from us. No country in the world can have enough intensive care beds if this virus really takes hold and people have not done the right thing.”
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On a positive note, the premier pointed to some early signs of success.
“I’m pleased to report that the social distancing measures, the different rules that we’ve put in place, stages 1, 2 and 3, really are changing the way the city and state works. You can see it. In terms of public spaces, you can see it,” he said.
“On public transport, the road network, it is having a difference. It is helping us to suppress the total number of cases, to flatten the curve, as we sometimes say, to protect our health system and to save lives. So yes, it’s a lot, but it means a lot as well, and it is achieving what we want to see happen. And that is to say – whilst there are still more cases each day, we’re not seeing the scenes and the kind of growth in cases that so many other parts of the world are experiencing right now.”