As Omicron reaches its peak in new Zealand, staff at Auckland's Middlemore Hospital are tired, stressed and many are off work sick.
The hospital's chief executive, Dr Pete Watson, told Breakfast he's anticipating the peak to last another couple of weeks.
He said they have five Covid-19 wards, but the rest of the hospital is also busy with Covid cases, because there are people in for other health conditions.
"It's really a team effort. Everybody's tired and numbers of people are going off sick - that varies depending on the area, depending on the day but people are really helping out."
Watson said Middlemore had reduced services for conditions that are not time critical to free up resources, particularly nursing staff, to acute wards.
"This is unprecedented times so we're having to be really innovative and flexible," he said, acknowledging the efforts of healthcare workers around the country.
"We're under pressure and stress but we are also hopeful that the cases now, and we're seeing this, might be starting to plateau a bit so we're in this phase of having ramped up but hopefully be able to stabilise at this level."
His comments come as there were 21,015 Covid-19 cases reported in the community on Thursday.
There are now 845 people in hospital with the virus, including 16 in an intensive care or high dependency unit.
This means, according to RNZ, Auckland hospitals are dealing with far more Covid-19 patients than they predicted in even their worst case scenarios.
Breakfast host John Campbell asked if they were coping at Middlemore Hospital.
"Look, it's really tough, I've got to be honest," Watson replied. "People are tired, many people are going off sick and it's stressful so we're doing all we can to support people.
"We will get through it but it's difficult times at the moment."
The positive news was that Watson said there has been a reduction in ICU patients compared to the Delta outbreak in Auckland - pointing to higher rates of vaccination.
"Across the hospital here this morning we've got around just over 150 patients actually in the hospital and of those four are in ICU - smaller numbers than with Delta and that's a really good thing, that's the benefit of vaccination, the low rates of people becoming really, really sick," he said.
"Omicron might be less severe but because of the sheer numbers of people have underlying health conditions and for some of those people this is a fatal disease and people need to remember that.
"The thing that will protect people and reduce the likelihood of them ending up in hospital, certainly ending up in ICU, is getting vaccinated. So that is paying real dividends here at Middlemore but across all of the hospitals in New Zealand at this point."
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