LONDON (AP) – UK hospitals are canceling non-urgent procedures and scrambling to find room for COVID-19 patients as coronavirus cases continue to increase, despite difficult new restrictions to curb a rapidly spreading new variant of the virus.
A further 41,385 confirmed cases were recorded across the UK on Monday. It was the first time that the daily number of cases reported in the country exceeded 40,000, although many more tests are being done than earlier in the pandemic.
Dr Nick Scriven, immediate former president of the Association for Acute Medicine, said the growing number of hospitalized patients was “extremely worrying.”
“With the numbers approaching the peaks from April, systems will be stretched to the limit again,” he said.
British authorities blame a new variant of the coronavirus for rising infection rates in London and south-east England. They say the new version is more easily transmitted than the original, but stress that there is no evidence that it makes people sicker.
In response, authorities have placed a part of England that houses 24 million people, under restrictions that require non-essential shops to close, allow indoor soothing and allow restaurants and pubs to operate only.
Nevertheless, hospital admissions for COVID-19 in the south east of England are reaching or exceeding the levels during the first peak of the outbreak. Government figures show that 21,286 people in the UK were hospitalized with the coronavirus on 22 December, the last day for which data are available. This is just slightly lower than 21,683 COVID-19 patients admitted to UK hospitals on 12 April.
Dr Katherine Henderson, president of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine, described her experience in a hospital on Christmas Day as ‘wall-to-wall COVID’.
“The chances are high that we will be able to cope, but we can do it at a cost,” Henderson told the BBC. “The cost is not to do what we had hoped for, which has the ability to keep non-COVID activities going.”
The UK has reported more than 71,000 deaths among people with the coronavirus, one of the highest tolls in Europe. A further 357 deaths were reported Monday.
Cabinet Minister Michael Gove said more parts of England might have to impose the strictest restrictions if the numbers did not fall. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have also introduced strong lock-in measures.
There is still growing confidence that aid could emerge soon, with the expectation that British regulators may approve a second coronavirus vaccine this week.
According to British media reports, the Regulatory Agency of Medicines and Healthcare Products is likely to give the green light to a vaccine made by AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford.
On December 2, the regulator approved a rift between the American pharmaceutical company Pfizer and the German firm BioNTech, making Britain the first country to have access to a rigorously tested vaccine. More than 600,000 people in the UK received the first of two shots needed for the vaccine.
If the AstraZeneca-Oxford vaccine is granted this week, the public can start receiving it from 4 January. Britain ordered 100 million doses, compared to 40 million doses of Pfizer-BioNTech shot.
The AstraZeneca-Oxford vaccine is considered a potential game changer in global vaccination efforts because it is cheaper than the Pfizer survey and does not need to be stored in a freezer, which makes it easier to disperse.
But it had less clear results from clinical trials than its main competitors. Partial results indicate that the shot is approximately 70% effective in preventing diseases due to coronavirus infection, compared to the 95% effectiveness for the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine.
But the trials yielded two different results based on the dose used. According to researchers, the vaccine is protected against disease in 62% of those who receive two full doses, and in 90% of those who receive half a dose, followed by a full dose. However, the second group included only 2,741 people – too few to be conclusive.
AstraZeneca CEO Pascal Soriot told the Sunday Times newspaper he was confident the vaccine would work against the new strain and be just as effective as its competitors.
“We think we have established the winning formula and how to get effectiveness that is after both others there,” Soriot said.
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