Yahoo Finance New COVID patient being admitted to hospital 'every thirty seconds', NHS chief says
A new coronavirus patient is being admitted to hospital in England “every 30 seconds”, an NHS chief has warned.
NHS England chief executive Sir Simon Stevens described the hospital admissions rates as “staggering” and warned that the NHS is facing the most "unique" situation in its 72-year history.
He told the BBC’s Andrew Marr Show on Sunday: "The facts are very clear and I'm not going to sugar-coat them, hospitals are under extreme pressure and staff are under extreme pressure.
"Since Christmas Day we've seen another 15,000 increase in in-patients in hospitals across England, that's the equivalent of filling 30 hospitals full of coronavirus patients.
"Staggeringly, every thirty seconds across England another patient is being admitted to hospital with coronavirus."
Sir Simon added that hospital admissions were far beyond the levels experienced during the pandemic’s first wave.
He added: "It's become glib to talk about this as the worst pandemic in a century, but that is clearly correct.
Read more: Doctors fear being sued for having to choose who receives COVID treatment amid NHS crisis
"We have got three-quarters more COVID inpatients now than we had in the April peak.
"Although we are seeing some promising signs of the steadying of the infection rates, the fact is they are still far too high and, among some age groups, still rising."
However, Sir Simon said the vaccination rollout offered some hope - with NHS England administering the jabs "four times faster" than people catching the virus.
Watch: NHS backlog at record levels amid rise in COVID cases
He continued: "We will start testing 24/7 in some hospitals over the course of the next 10 days.
"But we are at the moment vaccinating at about 140 jabs a minute and yesterday (Saturday), a quarter of a million people got their vaccinations on the NHS.
"I'm pretty confident by the time we get to the end of today, Sunday night, we will have perhaps done 1.5 million vaccinations this past week, that's up from around a million the week before."
It comes as more than 3.5 million people in the UK have now received their first dose of a vaccine, with some 324,000 doses administered in the space of 24 hours.
Sir Simon also predicted that lockdown could be eased "gradually" around spring and summer time.
However, he said this would depend on the effect of new variants of coronavirus.
