Israel’s Health Ministry is sending a delegation of medical professionals to the Czech Republic on Thursday to assist with combatting a widespread virus outbreak in the city of Brno.

Health Minister Yuli Edelstein made the decision in cooperation with Health Ministry Director-General Prof. Chezi Levy, following a request by the Czech Republic and the WHO.

The eight-person delegation, comprised of doctors from Sheba, Beilinson Hadassah, and Shaarei Tzedek Hospitals and MDA paramedics, will depart on Thursday and will remain in the country for a week.

The Czech Republic has been facing a serious surge of virus cases since the beginning of October, currently one of the steepest in the world, and fears an imminent collapse of its health system due to a dire shortage of medical personnel and equipment.

Out of the Czech Republic’s 362,985 confirmed cases since the beginning of the pandemic, almost 170,000 were confirmed in the last two weeks and almost one-third of its 3,913 deaths were confirmed in the last week.

The central European country, like many others in the region, faces a dire shortage of medical personnel due to years of underfunding in its public health sectors and an exodus of doctors and nurses to better-paying jobs in Western Europe after it joined the European Union in 2004. Now, with the virus ripping through their hospitals, many health workers have been sickened, compounding the shortfall.

Over 13,200 medical personnel across the Czech Republic have been infected, including 6,000 nurses and 2,600 doctors, according to the doctors’ union.

It’s not just clinicians that central European countries need. Both Poland and the Czech Republic are building field hospitals as beds fill up on wards, and authorities say there are only 12 ventilators left in all hospitals taking COVID-19 patients in the region around Warsaw, the Polish capital.

As he announced new restrictions last week, Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babis put a date on when his country’s health system would collapse, if the new regulations were not imposed to slow the virus’s spread: between Nov. 7 and 11.

With one of the highest infection rates in Europe, the Czech Republic’s hospitals are desperately looking for volunteers. The government is deploying thousands of medical students to hospitals and other students to testing sites.

American National Guard troops with medical training are headed to the Czech Republic to work alongside doctors there. A Czech university student is running blood samples to labs, and the mayor of the capital is taking shifts at a hospital.

With cases surging in many central European countries, firefighters, students and retired doctors are being asked to help shore up buckling health care systems.

In the capital of Prague, Mayor Zdenek Hrib, who has a degree in medicine, volunteered to help do initial exams of possible coronavirus patients at a university hospital. Soon, 28 medical personnel from the Nebraska and Texas national guards are expected to arrive to help treat patients at Prague’s military hospital and a new field hospital at the city’s exhibition ground.

Croatia has asked former doctors to come out of retirement to help in hospitals, while Slovenia has put retired physicians and current medical students on standby in case its situation deteriorates.

Poland, meanwhile, is mobilizing soldiers to conduct COVID-19 testing, so medical professionals can focus on helping patients, as Warsaw’s National Stadium and other spaces are being transformed into field hospitals. Three times this week, the country reported new record highs in daily infections, and on Thursday it also announced a record number of daily deaths, at 301.

In Poland, deaths among people with cancer and other illnesses are also rising because doctors and nurses simply cannot keep up with their care, said Suwalski, the head of the cardiac surgery ward at the Interior Ministry Hospital in Warsaw, the capital’s main coronavirus hospital.

“The numbers of victims of this pandemic are not just the patients dying directly from COVID-19,” Suwalski said. “There are also (patients) who die because of the change of conditions, and even the collapse of the medical system.”

The problem is felt especially keenly in small town hospitals that don’t have the resources of university medical centers, such as the one in Kyjov, a southeastern Czech town of 11,000.

The director of the hospital there, Lubomir Wenzl, says staffing became critical in October as the number of COVID-19 patients doubled over three weeks to almost 60, and 75 of the medical staff fell ill.

He appealed for volunteers on social media and got so many offers that the hospital could pick who it needed. Mostly, the hospital chose people who have some medical training. They keep a roster of others they can call if they need them.

“I have healthy hands and legs, and this is something as a firefighter I can do,” said Antonin Kuchar, the deputy mayor and a volunteer firefighter who has helped move patients around the hospital.

Vojtech Coufal, a mechanical engineering student at a university in Brno, also answered the call. The 20-year-old has first-aid training and was couriering blood samples around the hospital campus.

While the volunteers’ help is vital, their roles are obviously limited, said Dr. Jiri Vyhnal, chief of the intensive care unit in Kyjov that treats COVID-19 patients in serious condition.

“It’s impossible to replace those doctors by anyone else, because you need a long time to gain experience to become a good intensive care specialist,” Vyhnal said. “The problem is that a small group of doctors and nurses will have to take care of a high number of patients treated with lung ventilation.”

As the number of coronavirus patients rises, the hospital has closed several wards: ones for ear, nose and throat, neurology, rehabilitation and orthopedics.

“We have been forced to stop doing planned operations, but we have to go on with urgent ones,” Wenzl, the hospital director, said.

The intensive care ward, meanwhile, has 11 patients and can accept up to 18, according to Vyhnal.

He said he and his staff are ready to work on their days off “to prevent an Italian scenario,” referring to how hospitals there became overwhelmed.

“We will do everything,” he said. “But of course we are afraid, who wouldn’t be?”

(YWN Israel Desk – Jerusalem & AP)