It's bad enough that variants are spreading. But the fact that the people in charge seem to be confused about the current state of the hospitals is very disturbing.
The positivity rate at 30% could be due to many reasons. I think people avoid testing unless they are very sick. Nobody wants to end up in a quarantine facility.

 

Wife said she can manage and says thank you for your kind offer. We have loads of tinned food that we was saving for an emergency. And we have only 4 more days till the 14 day quarantine expires, have to get retested for covid 19.
Time the wife gets creative in the kitchen.
Many thanks.
Jim and Eve.

 

I suspect a failure to use 100% effectively PPE and other methods to prevent cross-infections are the cause of many new infections and this is partly due to fatigue (i.e. having to maintain certain standards for almost 2 years). There are so many small points where infection can be spread and not just person to person. Recently my wife's daughter came to stay with us as she was running a fever - she was put in a bedroom and only my wife attended to her. But it was not as easy as it seems to ensure nothing pathogenic ever came out of that room.

In the Virus Centre where I worked, all our clothing was removed and only a set provided was worn inside - on leaving we all had to shower before replacing our own clothing. All inanimate objects had to be put into a formaldehyde chamber and retrieved from outside. All other living things (animals used in experiments) never left the Centre but were incinerated.

Nothing remotely like that protocol is used in hospitals and would be very complex to install and use (I can imagine it would be used for diseases such as Ebola but the number of infected people would be very low). So cross infections from ill to healthy is certain to happen at times. Even with the best standards possible, there will be lapses due to fatigue of carrying out the protocols over such a long period (with perhaps a year or more to go?). This is no criticism of hospital staff - it is just too difficult to achieve perfection.

I always thought that advice given early in the pandemic to wash hands was useful - but imperfect. No one walking around a shopping centre is going to be washing their hands every few seconds (the time it would take to transfer the virus from one surface to another and with the virus remaining on the hands) and no-one in big households is going to avoid intra-family transmission by handwashing, even if every 5 minutes. This also applies in hospitals, even with the use of gloves.

So, cross-infection is happening in hospitals and will continue to happen and there is no easy way to stop it.

Btw, my wife's daughter was on the brink of exceeding 40oC body temperature and the point at which we would have referred her to a hospital - but, as I explained to her later, a hospital is about the worse place to be if you don't want to GET ill.

 

I don't know. If I have to guess it would like be either lack of available PPE, or lack of instruction on how to safely use it, or under estimation of the contagion risk for the delta variant, or, most likely, a combination of all of these.
This is the official statement:

 

Well, you're shooting the messenger, but anyway, the reported occupancy numbers are wrong because they don't count people in the ER or people waiting for the ER, like these poor souls


Full article here: https://newsinfo.inquirer.net/1489370/doh-reporting-on-covid-hospital-capacity-wrong-med-groups-say
The article says DOH isn't denying that patients in ER and parking lots are not counted.