Field hospitals built in the early days of the pandemic but then mothballed are being reactivated.
British medics warned on Friday that hospitals across the country are going through a dangerous few weeks amid rising new coronavirus infections blamed on a new variant of the virus.
A day after the UK reported a record 55,892 new infections and a further 964 deaths from coronavirus, concerns are mounting about the impact on the overburdened National Health Service (NHS).
Field hospitals built in the early days of the pandemic but then mothballed are being reactivated.
The director of the Royal College of Nursing in England, Mike Adams, told Sky News that the UK was in the “eye of the storm” and that it was “irritating” to see people not following social distance counseling or wearing masks.
A leading physician also warned of burnout among health workers at the forefront of the hospital outbreak, while also urging people to follow the rules.
“I’m concerned,” Adrian Boyle, vice president of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine, told the BBC. “We are very much like combat stations.”
The number of new infections has more than doubled in recent weeks after a new variant, said to be about 70 percent more contagious, was found to be behind a major spike in cases around London and South East England.
Given the delay between new cases and hospitalizations and subsequent deaths, there are grave concerns about the course of the pandemic over the next two months in a country with the second highest virus-related death toll in Europe at nearly 74,000.
As a result of the spike, which has spread across the country and lockdown restrictions have tightened, the strategy around vaccine rollout has changed to give more people a first shot as soon as possible, with a planned second being postponed.
In a joint statement on Thursday, Chief Medical Officers of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland said the first dose of vaccine provides “substantial” protection.
Two vaccines are currently approved for use in the UK.
Just under a million people have received the first dose of the vaccine developed by the US pharmaceutical company Pfizer and the German biotechnology company BioNTech, and a small minority are also receiving the second dose as scheduled after 21 days.
In addition to the approval earlier this week of the vaccine developed by the University of Oxford and British pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca, a new dosing schedule aimed at a faster roll-out was drawn up. This means that the second dose of both vaccines will be within 12 weeks of the first.
The four medical officers said they were “confident” that the first dose of both vaccines would provide “substantial” protection.
“In the short term, the additional increase in vaccine efficacy from the second dose is likely to be modest; the vast majority of initial protection against clinical disease is after the first dose of vaccine, ”they said.
The new plan was widely criticized, with the UK’s leading doctors’ union warning that delaying the second dose is causing enormous problems for thousands of partially vaccinated elderly and vulnerable people.
“It is gross and blatantly unfair to tens of thousands of our most at-risk patients to try to reschedule their appointments now,” said Richard Vautrey of the British Medical Association.