The field hospitals that were built in the first days of the pandemic, but which were later ill, are reactivated.
British doctors warned on Friday that hospitals across the country are facing dangerous weeks, amid new coronavirus infections, which have been blamed for a new variant of the virus.
A day after the UK recorded a record 55,892 new infections and another 964 coronavirus-related deaths, concerns are growing about the effect on the overburdened National Health Service (NHS).
The field hospitals that were built in the first days of the pandemic, but which were later ill, are reactivated.
The director of the Royal College of Nursing in England, Mike Adams, told Sky News that Britain is in the “eye of the storm” and that it is “angry” to see people who do not follow social distance guidelines or do not wear masks.
A top doctor also warned about the exhaustion among health workers in the front line of the hospital outbreak, while urging people to follow the rules.
“I’m worried,” Adrian Boyle, vice-president of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine, told the BBC. “We’re very much at the battle stations.”
New infections have doubled in recent weeks, after it was found that a new variant that is said to be about 70% more contagious is behind a large increase in cases around London and South East England.
Given the gaps between new cases and hospitalizations and subsequent deaths, there are huge concerns about the path of the pandemic in the next month or two in a country with the second highest number of deaths in Europe from the virus, at almost 74,000.
As a result of the growth, which has spread across the country and seen the restrictions tighten, the strategy for launching vaccines has been changed to get more people a first shot as soon as possible, with a second scheduled late.
In a joint statement on Thursday, chief doctors in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland said the first dose of the vaccine provided “substantial” protection.
Currently, two vaccines have been approved for use in the UK.
Just under a million people received the first dose of vaccine developed by the American pharmaceutical company Pfizer and the German biotechnology company BioNTech, a small minority also receiving the second dose as planned after 21 days.
In addition to the approval earlier this week of the vaccine developed by Oxford University and the British pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca, a new dosing regimen has been drawn up, designed to provide a faster launch. This means that the second dose of both vaccines will be within 12 weeks of the first.
The four medical officers said they were “confident” that the first dose of both vaccines would provide “substantial” protection.
“In the short term, the further increase in the effectiveness of the second dose vaccine is likely to be modest; the vast majority of the initial protection against clinical diseases is after the first dose of vaccine, ”they said.
The new plan has been widely criticized, with Britain’s main doctors’ union warning that the delay in the second dose is causing huge problems for thousands of partially vaccinated elderly and vulnerable people.
“It is extremely unfair for tens of thousands of our most at-risk patients to try to reschedule their appointments now,” said Richard Vautrey of the British Medical Association.