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The government’s hopes for a new year to ease the Covid pandemic are crumbling, with ministers forced to take a 180-degree turn to reopen primary schools and hospitals across the country struggling with a growing number of seriously ill patients.
As the crisis intensifies, the Nightingale hospital built at London’s ExCeL center is expected to accept Covid patients next week, for the first time since spring.
East London hospitals are under extraordinary pressure, while Essex and Buckinghamshire have declared a major incident, allowing local leaders to seek government support. Other major hospitals across the country are preparing for the worst.
The warnings of a deepening crisis came as:
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New cases surpassed 50,000 for the fourth day in a row, with nearly 24,000 people in the hospital and 613 deaths recorded, one of which was an eight-year-old boy with underlying health problems.
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Scientists confirmed that the new variant of the coronavirus increased cases during November by a factor of three.
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The government bowed to a rebellion by school leaders from teachers’ councils and unions over their “arbitrary” moves to close primary schools in some areas and not others. It now means that all London primaries will be closed, except for vulnerable children and key workers, until at least January 18. The U-turn could lead parents in other areas to demand the closure of their schools.
Large hospitals in the capital, such as the Royal London, Barts and UCLH, are moving to convert wards into intensive care units to receive more Covid patients. An email to Royal London hospital staff said he was now in “disaster medicine mode”.
Tracey Fletcher, Executive Director of Homerton Hospital in Hackney, posted a graphic on Twitter of their Covid admissions on New Years Eve, showing a high number of patients in wards and intensive care across all age groups, from 27 between the ages of 25-44 to 41 who are 65-74 and 17 over 80 . “Patients admitted = extremely ill patients. No one’s partying in @NHSHomerton tonight. Please comply with all Covid restrictions, ”he tweeted.
In Essex, a major incident was declared, with patients airlifted from an overwhelmed hospital in Southend to Cambridge.
The Essex Resilience Forum (ERF), made up of members of the NHS, emergency services and local authorities, said this week that the number of patients in Essex receiving treatment for coronavirus has now risen to levels higher than those seen in the peak of the first. wave.
Those numbers were expected to rise further in the coming days and cases were expected to be particularly high in central and south Essex.
Lisa Ward, a senior respiratory nurse at Southend hospital, tweeted last night that the hospital was “very bad.” Ward pleaded with the audience to stay home after she finished her shift.
Conservative MP Sir Bernard Jenkin requested armed forces assistance for Essex in the Commons, including for vaccine deployment and school testing.
Buckinghamshire also declared a major incident this week. County Council Leader Martin Tett said: “Our 60+ population rate is now putting severe strain on our health and social care services; rates in this age group have increased by over 60% and we believe this will continue for at least the next two weeks. “
Although London is taking a big hit, with the large increase in cases related to the variant form of the virus taking off first in Essex and Kent translating into hospital admissions, the rest of the country is not far behind according to the NHS Confederation. representing the NHS organizations.
Danny Mortimer, executive director of the confederation, said hospitals were struggling. “It is possible to get by, but in doing so they are making concessions that they would not normally make. Increasingly they have to cancel and rebook and disrupt care for non-Covid patients, they have to staff areas very differently than they normally would as they repurpose cinemas to be areas of critical care or areas of high dependency.
“They are taking the same staff and spreading it out more as they experience higher levels of sick leave, particularly due to the impact of the virus workforce on their workforce.”
He said the nurses who should be in a team of four or five in an acute care ward were one of three, with sicker patients, but they were working heroically hard.
“It’s remarkable how people come in on their days off, working extra shifts, working part-time, particularly during this Christmas and New Years period to help their colleagues, to help their patients. This is all part of coping with the NHS, but it leaves people pretty tired. And I think also that people are also dealing with very different things: the severity of the diseases caused by Covid and the number of deaths that people have to handle both in hospitals and elsewhere, “he said.
If the Nightingale hospitals, which were mostly suspended after the spring, reopen, there will be no new staff, but those now in hospitals will be further distributed. Mike Adams, director of the Royal College of Nursing in England, told Sky News that the expectation of a large increase in capacity at Nightingale hospitals was misplaced. “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?” he said.
“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. “
Many NHS employees are distressed by false claims on social media that hospitals are empty. Dave Carr, a nurse in charge of intensive care at St Thomas’ in London, who feels he can speak as a representative of the union, Unite, is one of many desperate for the public to know what is happening inside their hospitals in a a time when misinformation about the virus abounds.
“The public must be aware of what is happening. This is worse than the first wave, we have more patients than we had in the first wave and these patients are just as sick as in the first wave. Obviously we have additional treatments that we can use, but patients are still dying and will die, ”he said.
Carr added that while more lives were saved at St Thomas’, those patients have to be hospitalized for longer, putting more pressure on hospitals, “because we can actually cure more patients than we could the first time.” He warned that St. Thomas’ was now treating patients from other area hospitals that were on the brink of “collapse.”
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