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An intensive care physician has advised that care be taken COVID-19 Hospital patients has “come at a huge cost to NHS staff.”
Dr Rafik Bedair, an intensive care consultant at St George’s Hospital in London, told ITV News: “We are trying very hard and our staff are working very, very hard, but obviously there will come a point beyond which we will not be able to stretch them. further away.”
His comments come as England posted its biggest daily increase in COVID-19 cases since the pandemic began with 50,746 positive tests.
This is the fourth day in a row that there have been more than 50,000 new cases of COVID-19 in the UK recorded in the last 24 hours, bringing the total number of cases in the UK to 2,542,065.
Another 2,434 people have been admitted to the hospital and 613 people have died.
Separate figures released by UK statistical agencies show that more than 88,000 deaths involved coronavirus they have now been produced in the UK.
But the death and case figures are likely to be higher, as Wales and Northern Ireland are not releasing death or case data on New Years Day, and Scotland does not provide death data for the same period.
Dr Bedair said: “We have all seen the projections in terms of the increase in the number of infections that we are seeing and how that will translate into hospital admissions. Now a proportion of them will end up in intensive care.
“Our main concern is that as those numbers increase, we may reach a point where we cannot stretch our intensive care resources beyond what we have, either because we don’t have physical spaces to move.
“Or, more importantly, we can get to the point where we have stretched the resources of our staff beyond what we can do and maintain the quality of care that we would expect to provide to an ICU patient.”
England
Another 420 people who tested positive for coronavirus died at a hospital in England, bringing the total number of confirmed deaths reported in hospitals to 50,668, NHS England said on Friday.
The patients were between eight and 100 years old. All but 12, ranging in age from 55 to 90, had known underlying diseases.
The deaths occurred between November 24 and December 31.
Another 39 deaths were reported without a positive Covid-19 test result.
Welsh
Public Health Wales will not release its daily Covid-19 figures on New Years Day.
Instead, they will be combined with data from Saturday.
Scotland
Another 2,539 people have tested positive for coronavirus, according to the latest data from the Health Department.
It is unknown how many deaths have occurred in the last 24 hours of the report, as the Scottish government is limiting the amount of data it publishes between January 1 and January 4.
