IPOH, Aug 19 — Perak hospitals can still accommodate Covid-19 patients, Mentri Besar Datuk Saarani Mohamad said today amid a surge of over 1,000 new cases in the state.

He rubbished claims that hospitals in the state have been pushed beyond their maximum capacity for Covid-19 treatment, especially those requiring admission into intensive care units (ICU).

"At the moment, the beds in ICUs are sufficient. We haven’t reached the point where patients need to sleep on the floor,” he said in an online news conference.

Saarani said that patients are being discharged from hospital daily after recovering from the viral disease and as such, free up beds in the ICU to take in new patients.

He added that the number of Covid-19 cases would fluctuate depending on the results of the swab tests carried out by health authorities.

"The more swab tests we do, the more we will identify. This is normal... we already expected that we would receive a lot of cases when we decided to do mass Covid-19 swabbing.

"We don’t want to hide anything from the public on the Covid-19 situation in the state. If we didn’t do mass swab tests then we will never know the true number of Covid-19 cases in the state,” Saarani said.

DAP Socialist Youth chief Howard Lee claimed two days ago that Perak hospital ICUs had been running at 120 per cent of their optimum capacity for the past month.

Lee claimed that the state hospitals were being taxed beyond their breaking point and the healthcare situation was out of control.

"At its peak, patients needing intensive care outnumbered ICU beds by 39 per cent; meaning for every 14 patients needing intensive care, four were denied or had to go without an ICU bed,” the Pasir Pinji assemblyman said on Tuesday.

Lee warned that the hospital situation would be more severe if the Covid-19 positivity trend continues.

Perak recorded 1,036 new Covid-19 cases in the state yesterday, raising its cumulative number to 53,657 since the start of the pandemic.

A total of 8,685 patients are currently being treated at the hospitals; 151 patients in ICUs.

A total of 44,113 patients have recovered from Covid-19 so far.