In the early phases of the pandemic, as you know, emergency departments really closed down. People stopped coming. There was lots of capacity in regional hospitals, our local post-acute care hospital, rehab and [Technical difficulty—Editor] and there was capacity in long-term care. You can argue in the end whether it was a good idea to move so many patients into long-term care in the province because of the consequences, but nevertheless, that happened.
Hospitals had a lot of empty beds. Our occupancy was the lowest it's ever been. Our ALC rate was the lowest it's ever been. We were able to redeploy staff, reconfigure facilities and bring in additional monitoring and ventilator equipment to create additional ICU beds. But for every one of those beds we created, we had to close five acute-care beds. Fortunately, those beds were empty at the time. We had to redeploy the nurses and other health care workers who were staffing those beds. We were able to do that last spring. We could not do that today, because of staffing shortages. The hospital is full. We have the highest number of ALC patients we've had in two years. We have about a hundred nurses off today with COVID-related...either they're infected or their family members or kids are infected.
In terms of the ability to ramp up that level, we're still running more ICU beds than we ever ran before the pandemic, but to get back to that double rate where we were in May and June, we would not be able to do that today.