David Oliver is a senior doctor at the NHS (National Health Service), the British public hospital. He has been working for months in the “Covid-19″ department of a hospital in the south-east of England, a few tens of kilometers from London, where the incidence rates of the virus, and in particular of its variant ” British ”, much more contagious, are the most important.
He agreed to testify (on condition that the name of his establishment is not cited), while the death toll from Covid-19 has just exceeded 80,000 in the United Kingdom and hospitals across the country are facing a much larger wave than in spring 2020 (with now more than 32,000 hospitalized). On the verge of saturation, the NHS faces “The most dangerous situation ever known”, Chris Whitty, the Johnson government’s chief medical adviser, alerted Sunday (January 10).
“The summer has been very calm, with almost no Covid patients. In September, we started to see a few cases again, then it increased steadily, but hospital admissions have been massive since mid-December, and they are accelerating. I think we’re still two or three weeks from the peak, says David Oliver, a specialist in geriatrics and a regular contributor to the British Medical Journal. In my establishment, we went from five patients with the Covid two weeks ago to 220, including about forty in intensive care [intensive care unit, ICU]. Depending on the hospital, between a quarter and half of the beds are occupied by Covid-19 patients. “
“Structural weaknesses”
On January 8, Sadiq Khan said ” emergency state ” for London, the virus being there ” out of control “, estimated the mayor of the capital, who calls for a tightening of confinement, with mandatory wearing of the mask everywhere outside. British hospitals could saturate “Within three weeks”, also alerted NHS officials on January 4.
“France has three times more hospital beds than the United Kingdom [qui ne compte qu’entre 2,6 et 2,7 lits pour 1 000 habitants] and twice as many intensive care beds as we do. Here, we often look with envy at the French system, insists Dr Oliver. In the spring, we held on to the shock, by reassigning all the teams and canceling all the operations. But today the staff are tired and many are sick from Covid-19. We are in winter and, before the pandemic, hospitals were already running at 90% occupancy rate this season. ” According to the president of the British Medical Association, Chaand Nagpaul, more than 46,000 NHS staff are currently on sick leave.
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