One Covid-19 patient admitted every 30 seconds in Britain
A patient is being admitted to hospital with coronavirus every 30 seconds, the chief executive of NHS England has said.
Sir Simon Stevens said he would not “sugar-coat” the facts and said hospitals were under “extreme pressure”.
“Since Christmas Day, we’ve seen another 15,000 increase in the inpatients in hospitals across England, that’s the equivalent of filling 30 hospitals full of coronavirus patients,” he told BBC One’s Andrew Marr Show.
“Staggeringly, every 30 seconds across England another patient is being admitted to hospital with coronavirus.” Speaking outside Kingston Hospital in south-west London yesterday morning, he said that figure would mean, for example, the hospital would be full with new Covid patients between “now and lunchtime”.
Stevens said pressure was also spreading to other parts of the country, after London and the South East experienced the initial surge due to the new variant. The East of England, the Midlands and the North West, particularly Merseyside, were now “right back under the cosh”, he added. The latest figures show 33,352 beds in English hospitals were occupied by Covid-19 patients, as of January 17.
When asked if patients were being transferred out of the capital to ease pressure on hospitals, Stevens said just nine patients were transferred on Sunday and it was an “important safety valve”. But he said it was a “clear indicator of the pressure on the NHS”, and added that the health service was facing a unique situation in its history. Asked if the NHS had ever been in a more precarious situation, he replied: “No. This is a unique event in our 72-year history.
“It’s become glib to talk about this as the worst pandemic in a century, but that is clearly correct. We have got three quarters more Covid inpatients now then we had in the April peak. Although we are seeing some promising signs of the steadying of the infection rates, the fact is they are still far too high and, among some age groups, still rising.”
During the first wave, hospitalised patients with coronavirus peaked at 18,974 on April 12.
Lockdown could be eased gradually around the northern hemisphere spring and summer time, Stevens said. He added: “Subject, of course, to this uncertainty around new variants of coronavirus, and it will be very important we don’t see those taking off in a way that undermines the effectiveness of the vaccines we have.”
But Professor Azra Ghani, an infectious disease epidemiologist at Imperial College London, said it was “very difficult to say” when the balance would be reached between bringing case numbers under control and vaccinating the most vulnerable. “The first thing we need to focus on right now is getting those case numbers down,” she said.
“Really, we want to get back to the situation we were in in the summer with relatively low case numbers compared to now, so that we can actually test and trace and reduce onward infections.”
It comes as three out of four ambulance staff said they were at “breaking point”, with the crisis much worse than last March. A survey carried out by the GMB union found almost two out of three of 2000 of its members surveyed believed their PPE should be upgraded.
“In 24 years in the ambulance service, I’ve never, ever seen staff sat on station at the start of the shift so frightened (almost to tears) to go out on an ambulance,” one respondent said.
Rachel Harrison, GMB national officer, said: “Ambulance staff are going off sick in droves while the service collapses around them.
“A massive 93 per cent are crying out for better protection, the PPE they are given just isn’t fit for purpose.”
A spokesman for the Department of Health and Social Care said guidance on the “safest levels and standards” of PPE was written by experts and agreed by all four UK chief medical officers.