A perfect storm of flu and Covid
HOSPITALS may face a perfect winter storm of Covid- 19 and flu despite being better prepared to treat virus patients, health chiefs have warned.
NHS Providers, which represents trusts in England, said survival rates had improved dramatically and the average time sufferers spent in hospital had halved.
But a “full- blown” second wave of Covid- 19 combined with flu season – at a time when the NHS is still trying to recover from the first peak – could still present a critical challenge.
The latest figures show 274 people were admitted to hospitals in England with coronavirus on Friday and a total of 1,615 were being treated.
The figure is a far cry from the more than 3,000 daily admissions recorded at the peak of the epidemic in April, but it is more than five times higher than this time last month.
Asked how the second wave may play out, NHS Providers chief executive Chris Hopson said yesterday: “There is a range of possible outcomes but certainly the worst end of the predictions is a perfect storm.
Backlogs
“We know that in the winter the NHS is at its most busy, we know that when it’s winter people stay and spend more time indoors and there’s colder weather, which means that the virus is likely to spread more easily.
“What I think the perfect storm potentially is, is a combination of a full- blown second wave meets that bad weather, meets winter flu, just at the point when we’re trying to go full pelt to recover the care backlogs that built up during the first wave.”
Some hospitals have lost up to 30 per cent of their capacity because of the infection control measures needed to keep patients safe, including separate Covid and non- virus areas.
Meanwhile, exhausted staff have not had time to recover after battling the first wave.
Despite the bleak forecast, officials hope the death toll will remain lower than in the first wave now medics have learned how best to treat the disease.
Mr Hopson told BBC Radio 4’ s Broadcasting House programme: “Your chances of surviving if you’ve got Covid and are hospitalised have risen across Europe from around 65 to actually above 80 per cent.
“And we know that people who have got Covid and have to be hospitalised are staying less time in hospital. The average length of stay has dropped from about 21 days to 10 days.
“That is a bit of good news, we absolutely understand and know a lot better about how to treat this dreadful virus more effectively.”
NHS Providers has also warned that the Test And Trace service will need to improve quickly in order to be fit for purpose as demand continues to surge. Mr Hopson said testing capacity needed to quadruple in three months and the results delivered far more rapidly.
The organisation is also calling for new testing facilities to allow people to be checked for Covid- 19 closer to their homes or places of work. People who need
this include NHS staff who urgently have to know whether they are carrying the virus.
The problems that have dogged NHS Test and Trace since its launch in May will be laid bare in a BBC Panorama episode tonight.
One whistleblower hired as a contact tracer told the programme that they did not make a single successful call during 10 weeks working for the service.
Another, whose job was to obtain details of close contacts from people who had tested positive, said she had spoken to only one person in four months.
Labour mayor of Leicester Sir Peter Soulsby told the BBC he believed the lockdown in his city could have been avoided if local authorities had been plugged into the national system earlier.
He said: “If they had been feeding through to us where the positive tests were coming from... we could have intervened at a much, much earlier stage.”
A spokesman for the Department of Health and Social Care said: “NHS Test And Trace is one of the largest testing and contact tracing systems in the world.
“The service is working hard to break chains of transmission with almost half a million people who may otherwise have unknowingly spreading coronavirus contacted and told to isolate.”
● BBC Panorama: Test and Trace Exposed is on BBC One today at 7.30pm, or afterwards on BBC iPlayer.