Prime Minister Boris Johnson said that if people do not self-isolate, the country’s socialised health care system will soon be “overwhelmed” by patients with the COVID-19 virus.
Boris Johnson urged people to “stay at home” while warning that the United Kingdom is only “two to three” weeks behind Italy in the number of people infected with coronavirus. Mr Johnson said that the numbers in Britain are “very stark” and are “accelerating”.
“Unless we act together, unless we make the heroic and collective national effort to slow the spread — then it is all too likely that our own NHS will be similarly overwhelmed. That is why this country has taken the steps that it has, in imposing restrictions never seen before either in peace or war,” Johnson said per The Telegraph.
“The Italians have a superb health care system. And yet their doctors and nurses have been completely overwhelmed by the demand. The Italian death toll is already in the thousands and climbing,” he added.
On Saturday, it was revealed that 56 more people in the UK have died from coronavirus, bringing the total death toll to 233. In Italy, 739 people infected with the virus died in a single day, bringing the total number of deaths in the country to 4,825 as of Sunday.
Mr Johnson’s stark warnings were backed up by Simon Walsh, the deputy chairman of the British Medical Association’s consultants committee.
“Unless the trajectory is very significantly changed by the government’s measures, then the demands at the peak are going to massively exceed our critical care bed capacity across the UK,” Walsh told The Guardian.
Mr Walsh said that predictive models show that London will need a rise of 130 per cent in critical care capacity to deal with the crisis, but warned that rural areas in the UK, which are home to more elderly people, will need an increase of 600 per cent to cope with the increased burden.
“You can imagine that’s difficult if not impossible to achieve. Which means patients being transferred to urban centres, which brings new challenges,” Walsh explained.
It is feared that as a result of the increased pressure placed on the NHS, doctors will have to start rationing care, as has reportedly begun in Italy.
The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (Nice) has already begun instructing doctors in the UK to only admit patients into critical care units “on the basis of medical benefit, taking into account the likelihood that the person will recover to an outcome that is acceptable to them”.
The NHS in England currently has just 8,175 ventilator machines and doctors have said that they are already having to deny access to the potentially life-saving machines to patients because of the limited supply.
Dr Rahuldeb Sarkar, a doctor in respiratory medicine and critical care in Kent, said that he has been forced to take patients, who show no signs of improvement, off ventilation machines early.
“In normal days, that patient would be given some more days to see which way it goes,” Sarkar lamented.
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