2,000 people may be admitted to hospital every day when Omicron hits its peak

Covid hospital admissions could reach 2,000 a day, an expert has warned.

Graham Medley, professor of infectious disease modelling at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “Most of the infections at the moment are in young adults, so these are people who are far less likely to need hospital treatment in any case.

“But in the past, in previous waves, we’ve seen that move out into more older and more vulnerable generations and there’s no reason to suspect that won’t happen during this wave.

“And then the numbers of people who end up in hospital is some combination of when people get infected, their vaccination status, as well as what Omicron is doing.

“I think it is a very real possibility that if the numbers of infections increasing continues in the way that it has done and it spills out into older age groups than we could see the number of people being omitted to hospital getting very large and certainly going over the thousand, maybe up to 2,000 a day.”