LONDON – Britain’s pandemic is fueled by a mutant Covid-19 strain, and the country’s health workers are paying a hefty price.
The virus has already killed more than 76,000 people in the UK – according to Johns Hopkins University the worst death toll in Europe and the fifth worst in the world. Hospitalization numbers reach new highs.
A further 68,053 confirmed cases were announced by the government on Friday – the highest single day so far – making it the eleventh day in a row that more than 50,000 new cases have been reported.
“It’s gone completely crazy,” said Ben Schischa, an eight-year-old paramedic who works in and around London and has been at the forefront of the pandemic since March.
Schischa, 39, said emergency calls from people confirming or suspecting they had “exponentially” exploded Covid-19 compared to even a week or two ago.
Schischa said he saw patients wait hours in ambulances until the hospital had enough room for it. One patient he picked up had been waiting outside a hospital for six hours the previous day, he said.
“It’s just an example of what’s going on right now. And it’s the same everywhere – London, Kent, Essex,” Schischa said, referring to provinces in the south-east of England that had been hit hardest. “It’s like a war zone again.”
The worsening crisis and the news of the new tension are taking a psychological toll. The thought that he would take the virus home to his family bothers him. “You just do not know what is going to happen,” he said.
England and Scotland have entered into new national exclusions to curb the spread of the mutant strain and to try to prevent Britain’s beloved, taxpayer – funded national health service from collapsing on Monday.
“Our hospitals are under more pressure from Covid-19 than ever before since the start of the pandemic,” said British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, announcing the new restrictions.
London Mayor Sadiq Khan has declared a ‘major incident’ in hospitals in the capital by Friday, acknowledging that health services are ‘in danger of being overwhelmed’. Hospitals will get out of bed within two weeks unless the spread of the virus slows down, he warned.
“Everyone is very stretched. Hospitals are very busy,” said Dr. Jon Williamson, an anesthetist who has been redeployed to help treat Covid-19 patients in the intensive care unit at Whittington Hospital in north London, said.
With the unit filled with Covid-19 patients, he said, the latest wave is very similar to what he saw in March; patients arrive very ill and need high-level care.
“There is constant pressure on intensive care,” said Williamson, who – with the permission of the hospital – documented the Covid-19 crisis with his camera and posted the results on his Instagram account.
He said he and his colleagues could remedy the situation by transferring critical patients to other hospitals as they get out of bed. But he is worried about what could happen in the coming weeks when hospitalizations and deaths catch up with the striking case numbers.
“You will suddenly reach a point where everyone fails together, and the whole system will suddenly reach capacity,” he said. “The system has not failed yet, but it has been incredibly stretched.”
The UK’s medical chiefs said on Monday that many parts of the healthcare system were under tremendous pressure, with a large number of Covid-19 patients in hospitals and in intensive care.
“We are not confident that the NHS can handle a further sustained increase in affairs,” they said in a statement. “And without further action, there is a significant risk that the NHS will be overwhelmed in the next 21 days.”
It’s not just the health of other people that worries them.
During the first wave last year, more health workers were killed by Covid-19 in the UK than almost anywhere else, according to figures compiled by Amnesty International in July. The watchdog agency has found more than 540 deaths in health care and social workers in England and Wales – just behind Russia.
And nearly 60 per cent of doctors suffer from some form of anxiety or depression, and 46 per cent say their condition has worsened since the start of the pandemic, according to a survey released by the British Medical Association last week .
Nearly 70 percent said their levels of fatigue and exhaustion are higher than normal as they deal with daily record numbers and a growing backlog in care.
The NHS is facing a ‘perfect storm’ of huge workload and staff burnout, said the association’s chairman, dr. Chaand Nagpaul, warned Monday.
“Doctors are desperate,” he said.
An NHS England spokesman said in an email on Monday that the increase in Covid-19 case numbers across the country meant all hospitals were “very busy”.
Dr Rachel Clarke, a palliative care specialist at a hospital in Oxfordshire, a county north-west of London, recalls being horrified by images coming from New York in April of overwhelmed hospitals and of people being treated in tents outside. is.
“I feel like we inhabit the world to some extent now,” said Clarke, 48. “We do not have patients in tents, but patients trapped in ambulances do sit outside the hospital because we can not physically get them into the hospital. ‘
According to Clarke, staff members at her hospital are distressed and exhausted, and many people have had post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms from the first wave.
“They are in the same situation again,” she said. “You see patients after patients with the same symptoms, the same disease, over and over. And sometimes you talk to them knowing that there is a very high chance that they could be dead in the morning. It hurts so much to be in this situation. the second time. ‘
Dr Julia Grace Patterson, a psychiatrist who runs the doctor-led advocacy organization EveryDoctor, said she was concerned about the mental health of first responders who are reliving the trauma of the early days of the pandemic.
“There wasn’t really a period of stopping or releasing or the ability to process any of those things,” Patterson said.
Healthcare workers never really relaxed between the peaks of the pandemic because they were catching up with the surgeries and appointments that were delayed or canceled during the first wave. “There was really no interruption for them,” she said.
Another layer of distress is the amount of misinformation, Clarke said, who regularly tweets about what she sees on the front lines.
“Some people say you’re a liar, it’s a scam, it’s not really and you’re a disgrace,” she said. “I had death and rape threats because I got up. and said how serious Covid-19 is. “
But despite being tired and desperate for things to be different, she says, healthcare workers still work on their bodies and put patients first time again.
“They give everything they have to patients,” Clarke said.