Hospitals in England plans to transfer some patients to nursing homes or other centers due to the growing demand for beds due to the exponential increase in coronavirus cases that threaten to saturate the system, medical officials said on Thursday.
“The situation is escalating very fast. Last week we saw 5,000 new COVID-19 patients arriving in hospitals, the equivalent of 10 hospitals full of COVID patients in just seven days,” NHS Providers director Chris Hopson told the BBC. , a public body in charge of providing medical centers.
“We are getting to a point where the hospital beds are full,” he added, explaining that he is looking for beds available elsewhere, such as nursing homes.
Even if the number of patients with covid-19 increases due to lower projections and the increase in hospital capacity has paid off, there would be a shortage of 2,000 general and intensive care beds in London hospitals by January 19, the Health Service Journal said. , citing information provided by the public health service to those in charge of hospitals.
Faced with another wave of an unstoppable coronavirus since the discovery of a new, seemingly more contagious strain in December, Britain recorded 1,162 deaths on Thursday. With a total of 78,508 deaths, it is again the country in Europe most affected by the pandemic, surpassing Italy.
The Boris Johnson government, widely criticized for its irregular policies, is now focusing its strategy on the closure imposed on England on Tuesday and on a sharp acceleration of the vaccination campaign, which was the first Western country to launch on 8 December.
Two new drugs
The UK has already inoculated almost 1.5 million people with vaccines developed by Pfizer / BioNTech and AstraZeneca / Oxford.
And the executive has set a goal to vaccinate everyone over the age of 70, in addition to health care workers, by mid-February, nearly 14 million people.
“This is a national challenge on a similar scale to what we have seen so far. And it will require an unprecedented national effort, and of course there will be difficulties,” Johnson told a news conference, proud to have vaccinated more. many people than all countries. The Europeans came together.
But for now the health situation is “worse than in the first wave and it is much more difficult to manage”Rupert Pearse, an intensive care specialist at Royal London Hospital, told the BBC.
“If we don’t take the blockade seriously, the impact on health care across the country could be catastrophic,” he warned.
In this context, the Minister of Health, Matt Hancock, announced on Thursday that intensive care patients can now be treated with two new drugs, tocilizumab and sarilumab.
According to a statement from the Ministry of Health, these drugs, which are commonly used against rheumatism, can reduce the mortality of seriously ill patients by 24% and can reduce the time of intensive care between seven and ten days.