Coronavirus live news: Italy records 766 more deaths but infection rate continues to slow | World news

The pattern of illness that we’ve seen in Gwent, and I can’t speak for anywhere else, is much younger patients than we were expecting. When the reports started coming out of Wuhan, we were led to believe that this was something that was particularly dangerous for the more elderly patients but I would say all the patients we’ve got an intensive care are in their 50s or younger at the moment.

Our youngest patient is in her early 20s. And there are, you know, there are patients who are very well, you know, a chap who’s a fitness professional but you know there are a lot of patients who are not, do not have any pre-existing medical conditions. They’re not diabetic or anything like that.

We’ve got 16 ventilated patients in the intensive care unit at the minute, which has led us to completely run out of space. So we’ve taken over theatre recovery, and we’ve got a further eight there. I think by the end of today, we will fill recovery. So that’ll bring us up to 25 patients.

And then we have another area prepared, which is the old high dependency unit and coronary care that we’ve taken over as well. We can fit a further 22 patients in that area. The way things are going at the minute, the rate of growth and the amount of admissions that we’re seeing, I would say we will fill that by the end of the week, probably.

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