Roulette wheel is still spinning as Johnson wagers it all on NHS blue
Aroulette table does not offer bets on NHS Blue, but if it did, that’s the colour on which the Prime Minister has placed our chips. It’s an outside bet and if it comes good it will provide a reasonable indication we are over the worst and the need for lockdowns.
But the wheel is still spinning. Indeed the ball was only really put into play eight days ago when we all got together for Christmas.
As Prof Chris Whitty, the Chief Medical Officer for England, put it yesterday: “Data show one in 25 people in England had Covid last week with even higher rates in some areas. The wave is rising and hospital admissions are going up.”
The odds have lengthened in the past few days, which is why tents are being thrown up in hospital car parks.
The larger ones, known as Little Nightingales or “Boris Wards”, are where not-fully-recovered patients will be kept should hospitals overflow. The smaller ones are made by Nutwell Logistics and other purveyors of “soft-shell body storage solutions”.
Ahead of Christmas, there were reasons to be cheerful. South Africa’s hospitals had not been overwhelmed, case growth was slowing and doctors were reporting a milder illness.
Government scientists cautioned
that Africa was not England and that festive mixing could not be later undone, but the odds seemed pretty even when the Cabinet met on Dec 20 to spin the wheel.
Today, alas, the charts of Cambridge mathematician Prof Oliver Johnson show hospital admissions are rising exponentially. There were 2,370 admissions in England on Friday, up 69 per cent on the week and the surge is now affecting all areas of the country and all age groups. There is also nothing in the data yet to suggest that hospital stays are any shorter and Covid occupancy of ICU beds has once again started to creep up.
However, front-line doctors said last week that they were seeing a “milder illness” and that, while things were busy, there was no crisis yet.
Dr Andrew Goddard, president of the Royal College of Physicians, said staff absence was his biggest concern: “It’s workforce, workforce, workforce. Omicron is hopefully going to be a short sharp shock … provided the number of admissions as omicron hits the over 65s isn’t too bad, I don’t think there’s going to be as much of an impact on the services as a year ago.”
But he added that if the tents were needed it would signal an “emergency in extremis”. Other doctors said bed capacity was the main issue, as discharging frail patients into the community was proving difficult.
“The difference now compared to the first wave way in March 2020 is we haven’t emptied out the hospital in the way that we did then, an intensive care consultant in the North said. “We’re going into this potentially massive wave with 95 to 98 per cent bed occupancy – the first time we only had 50 per cent of our beds occupied.”
About a third of Covid patients are in hospital with Covid rather than because of it. This is seen as a sign of hope. But doctors said “incidental infections” were making hospital capacity issues considerably worse.
“Once you have a ward that is infected with Covid you have to separate it both physically and in staffing terms from the wards that don’t have Covid,” an intensive care consultant in the South West said.
Two other new findings will worry ministers. Late on New Year’s Eve, a UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) report showed vaccine efficacy against hospitalisation was not as good as initially hoped. Booster jabs work well for 10 weeks before starting to wane but two jabs of vaccine were estimated to have an efficacy of just 52 per cent after six months.
The UKHSA also found the virus itself may not be as mild as it was in South Africa.