Britain’s Pandemic Pesach

With over 5,000 confirmed cases of COVID-19 and nearly 250 deaths in the UK as of press time, the figures are rising quickly. Northwick Park Hospital in northwest London became an early-warning of the threat to the country’s health system as the numbers of critical patients surged.

“We briefly had a crisis level of intensive care admissions, meaning that we had to transfer people to other London hospitals,” says Dr. Yaakov de Wolff, an acute internal medicine consultant at the hospital. “London has seen a much larger number of cases than the rest of the country. My hospital alone with about 500 beds has around 100 cases. The majority who are admitted to hospital spend several days there, mostly requiring oxygen therapy.”

“The crisis is now under control,” says Dr de Wolff, “but pressure is likely to remain, similar to what happened in Italy.”

But speaking to the Health Services Journal, a news service for the national health system, a director at a London health trust, a regional branch, called the shortage of acute care beds available “petrifying.”