First modification: 29/12/2020 – 12:06
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London (AFP)
The number of hospitalized for covid-19 in England exceeded the peak of the first wave and the number of infections reached a new record, placing health personnel “in the eye of the hurricane,” according to a person in charge of the health services.
On Monday morning, 20,426 people were hospitalized in England, affected by this disease, compared to 18,974 during the peak of the first wave, on April 12.
The number of infected people counted in a single day in the United Kingdom reached 41,385, according to official figures. Since the beginning of the pandemic, more than 2.3 million people have been infected and 71,000 have died from covid-19 in the country.
“Many of us lost family members, friends, colleagues, and at a time of year when we would normally be celebrating, many people naturally feel distraught, frustrated and tired,” stated the director general of the NHS (the national service health provider), Simon Stevens, in a video posted on Twitter.
“And here we are again in the eye of the hurricane with a second wave of coronavirus devastating Europe and this country,” he added.
Hospital services are “very, very burdened,” Matthew Kershaw, head of a hospital in Croydon, south London, told the BBC on Tuesday of a “difficult time.”
The British government is betting on vaccines to get out of the crisis.
The Medicines and Health Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) will give its opinion in the coming days on the vaccine developed by the British laboratory AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford, after having authorized the one from Pfizer / BioNTech, which has been injected into more than 600,000 people since December 8th.
Simon Stevens estimated that “by the end of spring” all vulnerable people in the country will have been vaccinated. “This is perhaps the best ray of hope for next year,” he stressed.
But vaccination efforts will need to be doubled to two million injections a week to prevent a third wave of the pandemic, according to estimates from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, released Tuesday by The Telegraph newspaper.
© 2020 AFP
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