Fears Chile on brink of health care collapse

Chile is facing the collapse of its healthcare system due to a lack of hospital beds to care for COVID-19 patients, officials have said.

"We have never (experienced) something so extended in time," said Dr Daniel Rodríguez who is the Intensive Care Unit technical director of the Santiago Emergency Public Care Hospital.

Rodriguez has lived through two years of intense work on the most important adult emergency medical care facility in the region.

"Every day is coming here and trying to do the same thing: every day looking for a place for a new patient, everyday people recovering, some days people sadly don't recover and die," he said.

Some 97% of Chile's hospital beds are now filled with severely ill COVID-19 patients even though 52% of its people have been jabbed with anti-COVID vaccines.

As of Thursday, there were 3,216 people in hospital intensive care units in the country.

In the capital, Santiago, home to eight of the country's 19 million Chileans, 99% of its hospital beds are at capacity.

Just last week Chile registered 45,500 new cases of people with COVID-19.

In Chile,1.4 million people have been infected with COVID-19 and 29,000 have died as a result of the virus.