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A spokesperson for the National Health Service (NHS) told CNN on Saturday that officials at field hospitals – hastily set up during the first wave of the pandemic but largely silenced since – had been invited on December 23 to “prepare services. use.”
Some London hospitals are now two-thirds full with Covid-19 patients, Royal College of Physicians President Andrew Goddard said on Saturday.
His warning came as the UK recorded its biggest daily increase in coronavirus cases since the start of the pandemic, with 57,725 new cases recorded on Saturday and 445 more deaths, according to the government dashboard.
In an interview with CNN affiliate ITV News, Goddard said: “If you look at the data, some of the hospitals in London right now … almost two-thirds of their available beds are filled with Covid patients and that is just a staggering statistic and must make us wonder if this is going to happen across the UK. “
“There is no doubt that the new variant is more transmissible and the escalation of cases that we have seen in South Wales, London, Essex and the South East have been much faster than the one we’ve seen with previous strains, ”Goddard added.
According to the latest government healthcare data as of January 1, there were 22,534 coronavirus patients in hospitals across England. That’s more than the nearly 19,000 during the April peak.
Doctors have made passionate appeals to the public to stay home and adhere to government guidelines for social distancing as hospitals and other health care services are under intense pressure.
In another post on Thursday, Pearse said: “Media reports on pressure on the NHS are all true. The situation in London is now WELL worse than the first wave and continues to deteriorate. Sad to see long periods of time lines of ambulances in front of the hospital where I work. “
“ Record number ” of Covid patients
London Mayor Sadiq Khan told CNN hospitals in the capital were treating a “record number” of Covid-19 patients in addition to the normal and non-Covid winter surge in demand.
“We now have more Covid patients in London hospitals than at any time during this pandemic and the London NHS, London hospitals and our fantastic health workers in London are exhausted,” Khan said on Thursday.
Khan said he was “concerned” about the hospitals overtaking, but added that the NHS had the flexibility to increase capacity, for example by canceling some elective routine surgeries.
“But the big worry we have is that if we continue to see an increase in the spread of the virus, it is possible that hospitals will not have the capacity to cope and this is particularly the problem because we do not have not yet reached January normal, no -Covid peak, ”he said.
Asked if the military could step in to help new patients, UK Defense Secretary Ben Wallace told Times Radio on Thursday: “Of course we are ready to help with Nightingales if the critical pressures exceed capacity. existing NHS. “
He said the military currently has around 5,000 people deployed in the Covid-19 response.
Most of England is now under the strictest level of restrictions in an attempt to limit the spread of the virus.
Amid the worsening situation, ministers were forced to reverse a decision to reopen some primary schools in London next week, after coming under pressure from local authorities and teachers’ unions. All London schools will now switch to distance learning from Monday, when the new term begins, with only vulnerable and critical working children allowed to attend in person.
The change of course came just two days after the UK Department for Education said nine London boroughs and the City of London would keep primary schools open, while those in 23 other boroughs would remain closed. Khan tweeted on Friday that the government had “finally seen the meaning and turned around” on its plan to open schools in some areas.
Vaccine deployment plan
More than half a million doses of the Oxford / AstraZeneca vaccine will be available from Monday, according to UK Health Secretary Matt Hancock, with millions more to follow in the coming weeks.
Batches of the Oxford / AstraZeneca vaccine began arriving in hospitals across England on Saturday, the PA news agency reported. The Princess Royal Hospital in Haywards Heath, West Sussex was among the first to receive a lot.
Dr George Findlay, chief medical officer and deputy managing director of the NHS Trust at Brighton and Sussex University Hospitals, said the hospital is expected to give the vaccine to hundreds of people a day from next week.
The vaccine is cheaper and easier to distribute than the Pfizer / BioNTech vaccine, approved for use in the UK in early December, as it can be stored at normal refrigerator temperature for at least six months.
The new strategy means that the interval between doses could be extended up to 12 weeks, instead of the three weeks previously stipulated. However, Pfizer said it did not have data showing that a single dose of its vaccine would provide protection against the disease after more than 21 days.
UK Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunization Deputy Chairman Anthony Harnden defended the dosing strategy in an interview with the BBC on Saturday.
“We’re not saying you shouldn’t have a second dose. We’re saying the second dose can be temporarily delayed to get more people vaccinated,” Harnden said. “We are in a dire situation in this country right now, the virus is spreading quickly and the more vaccines we can get into these priority groups, the more deaths and hospitalizations we can avoid.”
UK regulators also advised giving the second dose of the newly approved Oxford / AstraZeneca vaccine four to 12 weeks later.
New variant more widespread among children under 20
Even if the government achieves its goal of inoculating millions of elderly and clinically vulnerable people quickly, reducing hospital admissions linked to Covid, the UK faces difficult weeks ahead.
“It’s a pretty dark and depressing picture at the moment” in England, deputy chief medical officer Jonathan Van Tam said at a press conference in Downing Street on Wednesday.
“It is almost certainly true that the NHS has yet to see the impact of the infections that occurred during the Christmas mix and which unfortunately is sobering.”
As of January 1, at least 30 countries, including the United States, had reported cases of the most infectious variant of the coronavirus first detected in the United Kingdom.
A study written by a collaborative team from Imperial College London, University of Edinburgh, Public Health England and others confirmed that the variant has greater transmissibility and is more common in people under 20 years old.
While the study, published Thursday, found that people under the age of 20 made up a greater proportion of cases of the new variant of the virus, its authors said it was too early to determine the reasons, adding that further research was underway.
There is no evidence the variant is more deadly or causes more serious illness, according to health officials.
CNN’s Sarah Dean, Eleanor Pickston, Sharon Braithwaite and Hira Humayun contributed to this report.
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