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Ritons face a challenging start to 2021 as the coronavirus pandemic continues “rampant in our communities”, UK medical directors warned.
A new record of 55,892 daily cases of Covid-19 was recorded in Britain yesterday, the highest since mass testing began at the end of May, as the official death toll rose by 964.
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England is now in the ‘eye of the storm’
England’s director of the Royal College of Nursing, Mike Adams, said the country was in the “eye of the storm” and that the situation was “unsustainable”.
He told Sky News: “We are facing this pandemic with a huge shortage of health care personnel, particularly nurses.
“If you then add the burnout, the tiredness, the sickness rates that have started to rise, this is the result that nobody wants, but it’s really a last resort to get people back from their leave.
“In the long term, this will have a detrimental effect on workers, people need a break, they have to rest.
“So it is the eye of the storm and it is a situation that is unsustainable.”
Not enough staff to care for Nightingale hospitals, warns nurse chief
The head of England’s Royal College of Nursing, Mike Adams, said the expectation of a massive rollout of capacity at Nightingale hospitals was “misplaced.”
He told Sky News that the staff’s license was being canceled in different NHS trusts in England.
When asked if there was enough staff capacity to fill Nightingale hospitals, he added: “If we have to cancel the license for staff in these areas, the obvious question is where will the staff come from to open the Nightingales?
“I’m sure there will be movements to open some beds, there are some open beds in different Nightingale hospitals in different areas of the country.
“I am very concerned that the expectation of this massive deployment of capacity is misplaced because there are no staff to do it.”
They are ‘battle stations’ now in UK hospitals
People who work in emergency medicine are going through a difficult time and are “very much in battle stations,” said a prominent physician.
Adrian Boyle, Vice President of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine, told BBC Breakfast that emergency medicine is trying to “reach a crisis” but added: “What will it be like in the next few months? I don’t know. I’m worried. We are. very in the battle stations.
“There will be morale boosts in the short term, but people are tired, frustrated and fed up, like everyone else, whether they work in the hospital or not.
“People who go into emergency medicine expect it to be difficult from time to time. There is a real concern about burnout. “
He said there was “a great joint effort” in April and March, but sustaining that for a long time is uncertain because no one knows when the increase in cases will end.
Much of how these issues can be addressed “depends on the public starting to get involved, obey the rules and do social distancing and all the things that they are supposed to do,” he said.
We don’t know when the increase in the number of patients will stop: head of the London hospital
Anthony Gordon, professor of intensive care medicine at Imperial College London and an ICU consultant at London’s St Mary’s Hospital, said there had been a backlog of coronavirus patients in recent weeks.
He told BBC Radio 4’s Today show: “We have seen a steady increase since before Christmas.
“We had seen the cases come back during October and November, but before Christmas there was a huge increase, a lot more referrals every day, and that has continued steadily ever since.
“Our concern is that we don’t know when this will end because there are still more cases to come.
“It’s about a week later before people get seriously ill, so that number could still go up and we’re very concerned about that.”
He called on people to go beyond government guidance when appropriate and only get out of the house if they really have to to lower the transmission rate.
Hospital admissions begin to rise across the country
Dr Alison Pittard, dean of the College of Intensive Care Medicine, said she feared that the additional pressures being seen in London hospitals to deal with the volume of coronavirus patients had started to spread across the country.
When asked if the problems were becoming more “pervasive,” he told BBC Radio 4’s Today program: “That is what seems to be happening.
“Everyone has seen what is happening in London and the pressure it puts on both organizations and staff, and we fear it is only a matter of time before it starts to spread to other parts of the country, and we are already beginning. to see that.
“It is really important that we try to stop transmission in the community because that translates into hospital admissions.”
Dr. Pittard said the staff had become “tired and exhausted” due to the increased workload after several hectic months dealing with coronavirus patients.
He added that moving patients to less crowded hospitals for intensive care treatment was a “logistical nightmare” and required more staff time.
We need to prioritize the first few doses of the vaccine to protect more people … fast
Dr Christine Tait-Burkard, from the University of Edinburgh, said it makes sense to vaccinate the majority of the population to try to stop the spread of the virus and make the vaccine last longer.
She told BBC Breakfast: “In general, it makes sense to vaccinate more people, but I understand that it will have caused some concern to people who already had the second dose of the vaccine scheduled and will have to wait longer. but the protection is very good with a single dose. “
She believes that the Pfizer vaccine will still be used for vulnerable people, while the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine, where more doses are available, can be implemented much faster.
She suggested that the military could be used in the launch of the vaccine, which must be done quickly, as “the NHS is under so much pressure from increasing the number of covid cases that it must be done with additional help.”
The British face a bleak winter despite the launch of the vaccine …
The spread of the mutant strain Covid ‘tripled during the close of November’
Axel Gandy, chairman of statistics at Imperial College London, said the high rate of infection in the new variant of the coronavirus meant that transmission of the disease was likely to triple even during November’s lockdown conditions in England.
It comes after the MRC Center for Global Infectious Disease Analysis at Imperial confirmed that the variant spreads faster.
Professor Gandy told BBC Radio 4’s Today show: “Overall, we have been able to determine that the new variant increases the number of reproduction, so that is the average number of infected people per infected person in the future, between 0.4 and 0.7.
“That doesn’t sound like much, but the difference is pretty extreme.
“Under the November lockdown conditions, the reproduction rate was in the region of 0.9 and with the previous variant that would mean that in two or three weeks, cases would decrease by approximately 30 percent, while in the new variant would triple.
“The number of cases would increase by a factor of three, so there is a big difference in the ease with which this virus spreads.”
He added that since the November lockdown had been eased, there appeared to be no evidence to suggest that school-age children were more likely to carry the new variant.
Global update: Covid-19 variant case found in Florida
The latest US case of the Covid-19 variant seen in the UK has been discovered in Florida, the southern state’s health authorities announced.
The case, revealed in a statement from the Florida Department of Health tweeted on its HealthyFla site, comes after reports in recent days of two individual cases of the Covid-19 strain discovered in Colorado and California.
The Florida health statement said the new variant of the virus was detected in a man in his 20s in Martin County, which borders the Atlantic coast over heavily populated South Florida. It said its experts were working with the Atlanta-based federal Centers for Disease Control to investigate the case.
The health department did not provide further details, such as disclosing the man’s medical condition or how the strain was detected, although it said he had no history of recent travel.
California on Wednesday announced the country’s second confirmed case of the new strain of the virus. The announcement came 24 hours after news of the first reported U.S. variant of infection, which emerged in Colorado, in a member of the Colorado National Guard who had been dispatched to help out at a struggling nursing home. against an outbreak.
London saw a ‘quiet’ New Years Eve: police chief
New Year’s Eve was “pretty quiet” in London, where Level 4 restrictions meant most venues are closed, said Ken Marsh, president of the Federation of Metropolitan Police.
Sporadic gatherings of people “who just don’t take note of what is being said” were quickly attended to by officers and smaller gatherings also dispersed, Marsh said.
He told BBC Breakfast: “I think the public has really realized that this is really serious, the position that we are in, and we didn’t see the numbers that we thought we would see.”
He said the number of officers who are now with Covid-19 or self-isolating has been peaking in the past three to four weeks.
He told the show: “We probably have 1,200 to 1,300 officers who are either out with Covid or self-isolating and this is projected to double in the next two weeks, and it puts great pressure on my colleagues who are still at work performing their roles.
“There are no other officers available other than the ones in the pot.”
