Coronavirus patients to be moved into Belfast Nightingale

A Nightingale facility was opened at the tower block during the first wave of the pandemic to provide extra intensive care capacity.

It was stood down in May as the number of hospital patients began to drop.

Nightingale hospitals are non-permanent facilities that were set up across the UK to deal with the expected surge in coronavirus patients.

While the Belfast Nightingale facility has not yet been officially brought back online, the News Letter understands the Belfast Trust has already decided to begin moving coronavirus patients into the tower block for intensive care.

The move is designed to free up capacity at the intensive care unit at the Mater Hospital.

This comes after another seven deaths due to the virus were reported by the Stormont health department.

Yesterday, another three deaths were reported by the Department of Health, meaning 10 deaths due to the virus have now been reported in the past two days.

The news about the tower block at Belfast City Hospital comes just hours after the News Letter reported that the Nightingale facility could be needed by the weekend to stop Northern Ireland running out of ICU beds, if current trends continue.

There has been a huge rise in the number of people in hospital with the virus in recent weeks.

The latest statistics show that there are now 150 patients in hospital with the virus.

Of those, 23 are in intensive care fighting for their lives, with 15 on ventillators.

With 98 intensive care places across the Northern Ireland health service, 63 are already taken by non-coronavirus patients.

Without the latest expansion of intensive care capacity, there would have been just 12 unoccupied intensive care beds left.