Suspected Covid outbreaks in hospitals across the UK have doubled in a week, official figures reveal – though the number of people admitted to wards with the virus is falling across much of England.
As parts of the NHS battle to cope with a surge in infected staff and patients, UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) data show there were 66 acute respiratory infection incidents in UK hospitals in the seven days to 16 December.
Coronavirus was confirmed in most of these incidents, according to a UKHSA document reviewed, by the Guardian. It represents a doubling in outbreaks compared with the previous week (33) and is the highest total recorded since the third week of January 2020.
Most of the outbreaks happened in London, with 28 recorded in the last week, almost half of all those in England (62). Nine were recorded in West Midlands hospitals, six in the east of England and five in the east Midlands.
Hospitals are scrambling to try to stop the highly transmissible Omicron variant spreading between patients and staff, NHS leaders said, while trying to cope with more pressure than last year.
Saffron Cordery, deputy chief executive of NHS Providers, said: “The safety of staff and patients is a key priority of trust leaders, and trusts are doing everything they can to keep nosocomial [hospital-acquired] infections to a minimum, including following stringent infection control measures and social distancing rules.”
Increasing numbers of NHS trusts were now having to scale back care, she said, because they were under greater pressure overall than the previous big wave of Covid last winter, even though hospital admissions were lower.
Nationally, the NHS has not yet experienced a major rise in Covid hospital admissions but there were significant regional variations. In London, admissions doubled in the last three weeks, and in north-west England the seven-day growth rate was 14%, the Health Service Journal (HSJ) reported. Covid admissions were falling in the south-east, south-west, the east of England, the north-east and Yorkshire, and the Midlands.
NHS officials have remained concerned, though, as hospital admissions reflect infections picked up on average about a fortnight previously, suggesting a sharp rise was already almost certain. The increase in hospital outbreaks reflected rapidly rising levels of the virus among the population, they said. However, the 100% rise in one week was 10 times the increase in outbreaks seen in care homes, where such incidents were now lower than levels recorded in November.
The British Medical Association has predicted that anywhere between 32,000 and 130,000 NHS staff in England could be off sick by Christmas Day.
Guy’s and St Thomas’ trust in London told staff last Friday that it was facing “significant shortages” because 350 employees were off because of Covid, a figure that had increased 25% in just 24 hours.
Ben Travis, chief executive of Lewisham and Greenwich trust, last week told staff it would soon have to take “difficult decisions” about whether it could keep providing usual services in the face of the Omicron surge, including non-urgent surgery.
One specialist lung doctor in north-west England said: “Numbers have gone up on both the ward and intensive treatment unit. Incidental swab positive – people coming in with something else [but then] swabbing positive – is a problem.”
But Dr Nick Scriven, a past president of the Society for Acute Medicine, who is a consultant in Yorkshire, said: “Our Covid numbers today are probably lower than at any time in the last 12 months at least. We can only hope that the spread will be attenuated by the booster programme and that illness requiring hospitalisation will be reduced, as with the current ongoing pressure there is realistically no room to expand unless the elective work is again cancelled – which I get the feeling is now the very last resort.”
