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The Southwest will be one of the first regions to run out of hospital capacity if nothing is done to stop the spread of the coronavirus, according to a document submitted to the government.
Based on the NHS England model of October 28, it warns that the NHS will not be able to accept more patients at Christmas, even if Nightingale hospitals are used, the BBC reports.
He says the Southwest and the Midlands are the least equipped to cope, and could run out of capacity within a fortnight.
(Image: Michael Cooper / PA Wire)
The documents have a grim reading and come amid reports that the government is considering a national lockdown in some form to halt an increase in COVID infections. The plan would be to ease pressure on the NHS in hopes that the measures will be relaxed by Christmas. But tighter restrictions will have a severe impact on people’s livelihoods.
According to the BBC, the documents suggest the UK is on track for a much higher death toll than it was during the first wave unless further restrictions are introduced.
Articles prepared by the government’s pandemic modeling group, SPI-Mseen, are meant as part of a presentation to the Prime Minister.
All models predict that hospitalizations are likely to peak in mid-December, with deaths rising through the end of the year before falling in January. The government will hope that a vaccine against the virus has been approved by then.
Scientists believe it is now inevitable that the entire country will end up in some kind of lockdown to prevent more than 500 Covid deaths a day during winter, and a lockdown is now the only way families will be able to spend Christmas together, it reports The Mirror.
Sage cautions it’s not too late to save Christmas, but it will take a longer lockout than the two-week ‘breaker’ they recommended last month.
The current estimate of the R number in the UK (the number of people to whom each infected person transmits the virus on average) is between 1.1 and 1.3, indicating that cases continue to rise.
Professor Gabriel Scally, a member of Sage, told the BBC’s Newsnight that a national shutdown was inevitable.
“The R number is still too high. Everyone knows these levels don’t work and they won’t work.
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