NHS hospitals in England appear quieter than usual this year, despite treating more than 9,000 patients with coronavirus.
A leaked document said that 84 percent of all hospital beds across the country were occupied yesterday, down from the 92 percent recorded last fall.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson shook Britain on Saturday when he announced a second lockdown and a return to his catchphrase “stay home, protect the NHS, save lives”.
However, the 84 percent figure published by the Health Service Journal suggests that the health service as a whole is not as heavily burdened as officials imply.
Bed occupancy has not been below 85 percent on average in any normal three-month period in the last ten years.
The only exception was between April and June this year when it hit 64 percent as hospitals were forced to exterminate thousands of non-Covid patients to make way for the epidemic.
Regional differences in the coronavirus outbreak mean that some places feel more polluted than others. A large hospital trust in Liverpool is already treating more Covid-19 patients than in the spring.
Officials are repeatedly comparing the spring situation as an acronym for the crisis, but won’t explain how busy hospitals actually are.
Tens of thousands of beds went unused during the height of the first wave of Covid-19, and officials say the hospitals’ “available capacity” is only around 20,000, leading to surprise warnings that they will run out of space by next month could.
And coronavirus data for all of England now shows the number of people hospitalized with the disease fell for the first time in a month from 9,213 to 9,077 on Sunday.
Daily admissions on Saturday – the most recent data – fell from 1,345 new patients on Friday to 1,109 on October 30th. Oxford University Professor Carl Heneghan, a vocal critic of the lockdown guidelines, said today the outbreak was “flatlining”.
Hospital bed occupancy fell to its lowest percentage in a decade this year, when medical professionals had to turn off thousands of inpatients to make way for a predicted increase in people with Covid-19. After normal care resumed, a leaked report suggests that fewer than the average number of beds are still in use
Even during the peak of the UK’s first wave of coronavirus, Covid-19 patients never made up more than 30 percent of all hospital patients, and tens of thousands of vacant beds went unused in the spring
Professor Heneghan said on BBC Radio 4 this morning: “Right now the cases are shifting in a way they weren’t three weeks ago. They start plating.
“The approvals are flat and the deaths are starting to flatten out. I hope there will be an update on this system tomorrow, Wednesday, that will give us a clear understanding of where we are going. “
The number of ventilators in the intensive care unit in England also fell from 815 to 802 on Sunday.
Dejected officials and politicians have repeatedly warned that the NHS is on its way to be overwhelmed by the second wave of coronavirus.
Boris Johnson was reportedly told by members of SAGE just days prior to the Lockdown 2.0 announcement last week that hospitals would be full by December 17th if he didn’t take tougher measures.
The slides presented in the briefing on Saturday suggested that this could happen even sooner.
Medical professionals fear that the number of people who need Covid-19 will become so large that they can no longer treat people with cancer and other serious diseases.
Doctors are already long behind on canceled or postponed non-urgent surgeries and procedures that they are now desperately trying to catch up with. A resurgence of people who need to be saved from Covid would jeopardize this progress.
However, the data obtained from the HSJ show that despite 70 percent more patients than in the spring, hospitals are less full than usual.
You have about twice as many non-Covid patients – more than 70,000 in wards as yesterday – and 9,000 coronavirus patients and still have at least 10,000 beds.
In the most recent measure – in the first quarter of 2020/21 – the NHS had a total of 118,451 beds available, of which 92,596 were general hospital beds. The others were in the areas of motherhood, mental health, and learning disabilities.
This presumably does not include capacity in Nightingale hospitals or private wards that have been rented out. Thousands of beds were readied as ministers feared a catastrophic wave of coronavirus patients, but many were never used.
Complete data on daily bed occupancy have not been released and the NHS is coming under increasing pressure to show the real pressures on its hospitals.
Coronavirus data for the whole of England now shows the number of people hospitalized with the disease fell for the first time in a month, from 9,213 to 9,077 on Sunday 1st November
Daily admissions on Saturday – the most recent data – also decreased from 1,345 new patients on Friday to 1,109 on October 30th
Explaining why only Covid numbers could be misleading, Professor Heneghan added, “One of the things about hospital admissions is that discharges are not taken into account. It also doesn’t tell you who that person is – for example, everyone who goes to the hospital will be tested.
“If you look at the patients in hospital records, this is a much more useful measure, and if you look at that on October 31st it was 9,213 and it fell for the first time on November 1st to 9,077 out of about 130 patients.
“This is the first drop in this data set in over a month. So I would look at the patients in the hospital, not the number of patients actually admitted, which is very variable and quite noisy in their context. ‚
The data received from the HSJ shows that confirmed cases of coronavirus occupy 10 percent of all hospital beds, up from six percent two weeks ago.
During the height of the crisis in the spring, that number never exceeded 30 percent.
An NHS spokesman said: “NHS doctors and nurses in many regions of England are currently treating more COVID-19 patients than at the height of the first wave. The key to maintaining the services is to ensure that rising coronavirus approvals don’t crowd out other care, as is currently happening in some French, German, and Dutch hospitals, as well as parts of the Northwest and Midlands.
“Hospitals have taken advantage of the summer opportunity since the first wave to prepare for winter and expedite routine surgeries, checkups and other services. The family doctors now offer more appointments than last year. “
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