LONDON (AP) – British hospitals across the country face a dangerous situation in January, medical professionals warned on Friday amid coronavirus infections attributed to a new variant of the virus. Authorities pressured to reactivate previously decommissioned field hospitals just to deal with the multitude of new patients.
Concerns are mounting over the capacity of the already overburdened National Health Service to cope with the expected increase in people seeking treatment for COVID-19 infections in the coming weeks, which may be further fueled by Christmas and New Year holidays.
On Friday, the UK registered another 53,285 new infections, slightly below the previous day’s record of 55,892. Although comparisons to the onset of the pandemic are difficult, since testing was limited in the spring, the UK recorded its four highest daily numbers of new infections in the past four days – all over 50,000 and about twice the daily number of infections. a few weeks ago .
The director of the Royal College of Nursing in England, Mike Adams, told Sky News that the United Kingdom was in the “eye of the storm” and that it was “irritating” to see people not following guidelines for social distance or wearing masks.
A leading doctor also warned of the exhaustion of health professionals on the front lines of hospitals, while urging people to follow the rules.
“I’m concerned,” Adrian Boyle, vice president of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine, told the BBC. “We are very much in battle.”
The increase in new cases is said to be due to a new, more contagious variant of the virus, first identified in London and southeastern England.
Given the time elapsed between new cases, hospitalizations and deaths from COVID-19, there are major concerns about the path of the pandemic in the next one or two months. Britain already has the second highest number of virus deaths in Europe, with 74,125, after another 613 deaths were recorded on Friday. The country looks set to overtake Italy and become the hardest hit country in Europe yet again.
As a result of the rise in new infections, which has led to even stricter blocking restrictions, British authorities have changed their strategy to launch coronavirus vaccines, choosing to give more people an initial injection as soon as possible and postponing the second dose to three months.
In a joint statement, medical directors for England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland said the first dose of the vaccine offers “substantial” protection.
Currently, two vaccines have been approved for use in the UK and both require two doses per person.
About 1 million people received the first dose of the vaccine developed by the American pharmaceutical company Pfizer and the German biotechnology company BioNTech, with a small minority also receiving the second dose as planned, after 21 days.
Earlier this week, Britain also approved a vaccine developed by the University of Oxford and the British pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca which is substantially cheaper and easier to use.
The authorities then outlined the new dosage regimen, which delays the application of a person’s second vaccine by three weeks to be applied up to 12 weeks after the first.
“In the short term, the further increase in vaccine effectiveness from the second dose is likely to be modest. The vast majority of initial protection against clinical disease is after the first dose of the vaccine, ”said official doctors.
Even so, the new plan faced some criticism. The UK’s leading doctors’ union has warned that postponing the second dose causes huge scheduling problems for thousands of partially vaccinated seniors and vulnerable people.
“It is grossly and grossly 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.
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