NZ complacency worries nurse

Much younger patients are becoming very ill very fast, says a New Zealand nurse working in Britain on the front line of the response to the new UK variant of Covid-19.

On Thursday, the UK reported 1564 new deaths within 28 days of a positive test for Covid-19, a record daily toll. More people have now died in the United Kingdom in the second wave of the pandemic than during the first wave last year.

The increase in cases is being driven in part by the new more infectious UK variant of Covid-19.

There have now been more then 86,000 deaths in the UK – the fifth highest figure globally – and 3.2 million have tested positive for Covid-19.

UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson said on Thursday that the risk of intensive care units being overwhelmed was substantial.

One of the people working in those units is New Zealander Hayley Reid, who is an agency intensive care nurse. She said the situation now is unbelievable.

In normal times there was one nurse to one patient, currently she is dealing with two patients but she is hearing ‘‘horror stories’’ of nurses handling five intensivecare patients in a shift. Last week she was at a hospital where all the nurses were handling three patients each, which didn’t leave any time to even go to the toilet.

‘‘So it’s like running for an airplane every second of a 12-hour day. It’s non-stop. There’s not enough time in the day – just multi-tasking the entire day just to get the essential jobs done.’’

One hospital she is working at offers support to the staff each morning and managers advise that nurses will have to make decisions about patients that ‘‘might go badly’’ because things ‘‘change in an instant’’ in intensive care.

Reid said at times she feels frightened. She has a ‘‘fancy mask’’ which she takes everywhere and that makes her feel safer.

She said the second wave of infections is resulting in patients who are different from the first. The first wave were older patients with medical histories. Now, much younger people, including some in their 30s, some who are pregnant, are being admitted.

‘‘They deteriorate and get incredibly sick so fast it’s hard to keep up. So it is frightening because our decisions are so important and people, when they can’t breathe they can’t talk, so they just look at you, begging for help, begging to save them and you can’t always.’’

While some theatres in the National Health Service are being maintained, in the main other surgery has stopped because equipment such as ventilators are needed for Covid patients.

However, there was a general policy of not placing people in induced comas and not putting them on ventilators, so more patients are conscious and able to ‘‘absorb the stress’’ the nurses are feeling. Patients also witness the last hours of others, with ‘‘deaths every day’’.

While many Britons were unaffected, so did not feel a responsibility to comply with

Covid-19 restrictions, there were other families where several members were in hospital, she said.

Asked why she remained when she could have returned to New Zealand, she said she had been in the UK for quite a while and ‘‘my life is here at the moment, although New Zealand is looking more desirable’’.

Reid will receive her first vaccine shot on Monday. She said complacency about the vaccine may be a risk in New Zealand because it has not been affected in the same way as countries like the UK.

‘‘They don’t understand the stress of it, the urgency – life seems to go on in New Zealand.’’

She urged New Zealanders to be vaccinated because it was not only for themselves but also provided protection for their families, neighbours and everyone else.