Greek hospital workers demand more hirings in pandemic

Dozens of hospital workers have held protests at hospitals in Greece, demanding more medical staff be hired as the country struggles to contain a resurgence of the coronavirus that has led to a new lockdown being imposed.

An increase in the number of people seriously ill with COVID-19 has led the country’s health system to come under increasing pressure. As of Wednesday night, Greece had a total of 1,104 intensive care unit beds, of which 496 were set aside for COVID-19 patients. Of those, 335 are already occupied.

The government has stressed it has massively increased the country’s intensive care capacity, noting there were a total of just over 500 ICU beds in Greece when it came to power after elections in mid-2019.

“Every humanly possible effort was made so that we can, in the intervening time between the first wave and where we are today, reinforce the ICUs with beds and personnel,” Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis said Thursday during a Parliament speech on the government’s handling of the pandemic. “Whatever was humanly possible to be done has been done and continues to be done.”

Mitsotakis said that no matter how many ICUs a country has, “and obviously we prefer to have more rather than fewer, a health system cannot cope if we do not hit the problem at the start of the chain. The start of the chain is the uncontrolled spread of the virus mainly through crowding and contact with people we do not know.”

The prime minister said the resurgence of the virus in Greece and the rest of Europe was due to “young people having fun. I’m not saying this as criticism, of course young people are more susceptible to such behavior. But it’s an observation and it needs to be heard.”

In the initial outbreak of the pandemic in the spring, Greece imposed a lockdown early, a move that was credited with keeping the number of deaths and seriously ill very low. But a resurgence of the virus this autumn has led to a rapidly increasing number of people in intensive care units, and a sharp increase in deaths.

As of Wednesday night, Greece's total confirmed coronavirus cases stood at just over 63,300 with 909 deaths in this country of around 11 million people.