The hospitals of England is considering moving some patients to nursing homes or other centers in the face of growing demand for beds due to an exponential increase in coronavirus cases that threatens to saturate the system, medical officials said Thursday.
“The situation is intensifying very quickly. Last week we saw 5,000 new covid-19 patients arrive in hospitals, the equivalent of 10 hospitals full of covid patients in just seven days,” Chris Hopson, director, told the BBC of NHS Providers, a public body responsible for providing medical centers.
“We are getting to a point where hospital beds are full,” he added, explaining that this is why they are looking for beds available elsewhere, such as in geriatrics.
Even if the number of covid-19 patients increased following the lowest projections, and the increase in hospital capacity yielded results, by January 19 there would be a deficit of 2,000 general and intensive care beds in hospitals. London, the Health Service Journal said, citing information provided by the public health service to hospital officials.
Faced with another unstoppable wave of coronavirus since the discovery in December of a new, apparently more contagious strain, the UK recorded 1,162 new deaths on Thursday. With a total of 78,508 dead, it is once again the country in Europe hardest hit by the pandemic, beating Italy.
The government of Boris Johnson, heavily criticized for its erratic policies, is now focusing its strategy on the confinement imposed on Tuesday in England and a sharp acceleration of the vaccination campaign that was the first in Western countries 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 itself the goal of having vaccinated in mid-February all those over 70, in addition to health workers, nearly 14 million people.
“This is a national challenge on a scale like nothing we’ve seen before. And it will require unprecedented national effort and of course there will be difficulties,” Johnson said at a news conference, proud to have vaccinated more people than all European countries together.
But for now, the health situation is “worse than in the first wave and is proving much more difficult to manage”, Rupert Pearse, an intensive care specialist at Royal London Hospital, told the BBC.
“Unless we take confinement seriously, the impact on health care across the country could be catastrophic,” he warned.
In this context, the Minister of Health, Matt Hancock, announced Thursday that intensive care patients will now be able to 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 serious patients by 24% and reduce the time in intensive care between seven and ten days.