Intensive care units are no busier than normal, data show

HOSPITAL intensive care is no busier than normal for the majority of trusts, leaked documents show, raising more questions about whether a national lockdown is justifiable.

An update from the NHS Secondary Uses Services, seen by The Daily Telegraph, shows normal capacity for the beginning of November. According to an NHS source: “Our position in October is exactly where we have been over the last five years.”

The new data showed that at the pandemic’s April peak, critical care beds were never more than 80 per cent full.

Even though surge capacity had been reduced since the first wave, with the closure of the Nightingale Hospitals, there was still 15 per cent spare capacity.

The documents showed there were 9,138 patients in hospital in England at 8am on Nov 2, although this has since fallen to 9,077. It meant Covid patients accounted for about 10 per cent of general and acute beds in hospitals. But more than 13,000 beds were still free.

In critical care, 18 per cent of beds were unoccupied, although it varied between regions. But even in the worst affected areas, such as the North West, only 92.9 per cent of critical care beds were occupied. Prof Carl Heneghan, director of the Centre for EvidenceBased Medicine at the University of Oxford, said: “This is in line with what is normally available at this time of year.

“I seem to be looking at a different data set to what the Government is presenting. Everything is looking at normal levels, and free bed capacity is still significant, even in high dependency units and intensive care. We are starting to see a drop in people in hospitals.

“Tier 3 restrictions are working phenomenally well, and rather than locking down I would be using this moment to increase capacity.”

On Saturday, Sir Patrick Vallance and Prof Chris Whitty warned at a press conf erence that bed usage would be exceeded on Nov 20, and even extra surge beds would fill up a few days later.

The leaked documents also showed that no intensive care units were in Covid-19 Pandemic Critcon levels above 2, and the majority were at 0, meaning they were operating as normal.

At the Science and Technology Committee yesterday, Prof Whitty accepted the number of struggling hospitals was small, but added: “We want to keep it that way.”

Yesterday, Dr Andrew Goodall, NHS Wales chief executive, said the number of coronavirus patients there in need of critical care was less than half the number at the peak of the virus.