Officials holding unscheduled COVID-19 briefing at 2 p.m. NT, as health staff divert to pandemic response

Health-care staff in the Eastern Health and Labrador-Grenfell Health regions are being diverted to keep on top of Newfoundland and Labrador's response to spiking COVID-19 cases, with record single-day increases for the past six days straight. 

With the diversions come the cancellations of appointments for some patients. 

As of Sunday, the province had 2,597 active cases of COVID-19, most of them in the Eastern Health area.

A live briefing with Chief Medical Officer of Health Dr. Janice Fitzgerald and Premier Andrew Furey will be held at 2 p.m. NT.

In a media release Sunday evening, Eastern Health said effective Tuesday it will focus solely on emergency acute services at health-care sites to in order to redeploy staff to help with the pandemic response. 

The health authority said emergency appointments will continue to proceed in the following areas:

Only patients whose appointments are going ahead will be contacted, said Eastern Health.

For surgery, Eastern Health said emergency, cardiac and cancer surgeries are going ahead. Patients whose procedures are going ahead will be contacted.

Medical imaging — including MRIs, CT scans, ultrasounds, mammography, X-rays, nuclear medicine, PET scans and bone medical density tests — is also continuing, though in these cases patients will be contacted only if their appointment has been cancelled.

For children and women's health, all maternal fetal assessment unit and prenatal appointments will continue. For all other appointments, patients whose appointments are going ahead will be contacted to confirm.

All radiation therapy and chemotherapy appointments will go ahead. Patients will be contacted directly if there is any change to their clinic appointments, Eastern Health said.

Lastly, all non-urgent appointments for outpatient laboratory services between Tuesday and Friday are cancelled, but emergency laboratory testing and services will continue. Outpatient blood collection sites are restricted to urgent blood collection only, including blood testing for patients requiring INRs, therapeutic drug-level monitoring testing and, for cancer-care patients, monitoring of cancer-clinic profiles and other required cancer-related testing.

Meanwhile, Eastern Health is holding a COVID-19 vaccine booster clinic on Monday from 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. at Waterford Valley High School in St. John's. The clinic, offering the Moderna vaccine, is for those 70 years old and older.

To meet the 22-week requirement between the second dose and the booster dose, only those who received their second dose on or before Aug. 2 will qualify.