(MENAFN- Gulf Times)
Hospital staff absences due to Covid have more than doubled in a month in England as the virus surge puts strain on beds, according to data published yesterday. The number of hospital staff ill or self-isolating due to the virus rose from 11,375 on November 29 to 24,362 on December 26, NHS England said.
The“sharply increasing staff absences” coincide with“a 10-month high for the number of patients,” warned national medical director Stephen Powis. The number of patients in hospital with Covid in the UK reached 11,898 on Wednesday, the highest level since early March, and a rise of 40 percent in a week.“We don't yet know the full scale of rising omicron cases,” Powis acknowledged.“The NHS is on a war footing and staff remain braced for the worst”.
The UK is one of Europe's worst-hit countries with a death toll of 148,421. NHS England has already started building temporary field hospitals to contain a possible overspill of inpatients if beds in main hospitals become full. It plans to make available as many as 4,000“super-surge beds”, in some cases using existing hospital facilities such as gyms or education centres. It is also trying to free up hospital beds by sending medically fit patients to care homes, hospices and even hotels.
Despite the surge in cases, Prime Minister Boris Johnson has opted not to increase virus curbs over the festive period in England, unlike the devolved governments of the other UK regions, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. The prime minister is focusing on encouraging the public to take up booster jabs, so far administered to more than 33 million. In a New Year's Eve message he urged people to“make it your New Year's resolution -- far easier than losing weight or keeping a diary.”
The UK medical regulator MHRA also announced that it has approved Pfizer's new antiviral pill for over-18s.
The Paxlovid pill for high-risk people with Covid was authorised last week by the US Food and Drug Administration for those aged 12 and over. Pfizer says clinical trials prove the pill reduces hospitalisation and deaths among at-risk people by almost 90%.
The UK government announced earlier this month that it had signed deals to buy more than 4mn courses of Pfizer's Paxlovid and US rival Merck/MSD's molnupiravir.
The risk of hospitalisation with the Omicron variant of coronavirus is about one-third that of the Delta variant, according to British analysis of more than a million cases of both types in recent weeks. Britain is experiencing a surge in Covid-19 cases driven by the highly-transmissible Omicron variant, with record daily infections of 189,846 reported on Friday.
While hospital admissions have started to rise, the government has said it believes the new variant is milder than the Delta variant. The number of patients needing mechanical ventilation beds has also remained steady through December, unlike previous peaks in the pandemic.
The analysis was published by the UK Health Security Agency, after it worked alongside Cambridge University MRC Biostatistics unit to analyse 528,176 Omicron cases and 573,012 Delta cases. It also found that vaccines can work well against Omicron.
“In this analysis, the risk of hospitalisation is lower for Omicron cases with symptomatic or asymptomatic infection after 2 and 3 doses of vaccine, with an 81% ... reduction in the risk of hospitalisation after 3 doses compared to unvaccinated Omicron cases,” the UKHSA said.
Susan Hopkins, Chief Medical Adviser at UKHSA, said the analysis was in keeping with other encouraging signs on Omicron but said the health service could still struggle with such high transmission rates.“It remains too early to draw any definitive conclusions on hospital severity, and the increased transmissibility of Omicron and the rising cases in the over 60s population in England means it remains highly likely that there will be significant pressure on the NHS in coming weeks,” she said.
Friday's daily data update showed 12,395 patients in hospital in England with Covid-19, up from 11,542 on Thursday and continuing a steeply rising trend. However, the figure is well below a peak of more than 34,000 in January.
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