If the British government’s goal throughout the coronavirus pandemic has been to protect the health service, the next few weeks will be the biggest challenge yet.
After overtaking Italy again as the country with Europe’s highest death toll, the U.K. is at the epicenter of the continent’s struggle to contain Covid-19. Daily infections are at a record—one in 50 people in England now have the disease—while Prime Minister Boris
Johnson this week shut schools and ordered the population to stay at home.
Medical staff say they may be forced to turn people away from hospitals if the latest lockdown fails to curb quickly enough a new strain of the virus that emerged in southeast England last month.
Winter already stretches health care and the virus means more patients are spilling into corridors and others are having to be treated in parked ambulances. The British Medical Association, which represents doctors, said the National Health Service is facing a crisis as rampant infections combine with staff illness and burnout.
“There are so many thousands of patients coming in,” said Tom Dolphin, 42, a consultant anesthetist at a London hospital. “The worrying thing is we probably haven’t seen the peak yet from the patients coming who got infected over Christmas and the New Year period.”
During 10 months of turmoil over its handling of the pandemic, the U.K. government managed to keep the country’s treasured NHS afloat and then became the first Western country to start immunizing its citizens. That now risks becoming a hollow victory as an accelerated vaccine program races against an out-of-control virus.
Medics had been pressuring Johnson to take nationwide action amid the surge in cases in recent weeks. But even at the weekend, the government was suggesting that schools would remain open.
New treatments mean a greater proportion of Covid-19 patients are being kept alive, but many still need to remain in the hospital due to breathing difficulties. That’s also putting pressure on capacity. The health system had already entered the pandemic short of about 40,000 nurses.
For nurse Stuart Tuckwood, the tougher lockdown brings at least some relief as the country desperately waits for the vaccination drive to pay off.
“People know how bad things are and how much worse they’re going to get if cases continue to rise the way they are,” said Tuckwood, who works in a hospital in the south of England and is also national officer for nursing at union Unison. “We can’t rely on the vaccine being the magic solution. There can be no complacency about the ability of the health service and staff to cope.”