Kevin, a recent patient at an Auckland, New Zealand, hospital, said he lodged a complaint after a visitor had sex with another patient in his ward. The incident reflected larger issues around visitations at hospitals as the country works to curb covid cases.
Around 5 p.m. last week, a patient at an Auckland, New Zealand, hospital noticed a young woman disappear behind a curtain to visit another patient in his ward.
“It was pretty obvious what was happening in there,” Kevin, the first patient, told 1 News. Support our journalism. Subscribe today. They were having sex.
“It was just all a bit staggering, all very embarrassing,” he added.
Kevin alerted the staff to the sexual activity, and they quickly intervened.
“There was a view that, ‘Hey, don’t be a spoilsport,’ but it was the wider covid question that I was raising, and in fact, I made a complaint to the staff on that,” said Kevin, who did not provide his last name to the news station.
Kevin’s concern reflects a larger point of contention regarding visitation at New Zealand hospitals as the country continues its efforts to curb new cases of the coronavirus’s highly contagious delta variant.
Despite being an early and consistent example of how to aggressively restrain the virus from spreading, New Zealand has seen an uptick in cases over the past few weeks. The country hit its peak in late August with 85 cases, but numbers continue to decline thanks to strict lockdowns. To date, there have been 27 covid-related deaths in the country, which has one of the lowest fatality rates in the world.
Even so, nurses organizations have expressed concern and outrage over the hundreds of visitors entering the country’s hospitals daily, specifically at three in the region that are overseen by the Auckland District Health Board. The New Zealand Nurses Organization complained that the hospitals are not adequately monitoring visitation, resulting in some people showing up in groups and others refusing to wear masks, according to the New Zealand Herald. “We cannot afford to have people unwittingly bringing covid into the system, threatening the patients who are vulnerable,” Kate Weston, the acting nursing and professional services manager with the New Zealand Nurses Organization, told Radio New Zealand.
Weston added that the visitors are also putting nurses at risk, and with hospitals already understaffed, they can’t afford to lose workers if they contract or are exposed to the coronavirus.