Key Highlights
- But it’s an incredibly precarious situation.
- Christmas strikes could be the Jenga piece that collapses the tower.
- That’s why I am appealing directly to resident doctors to accept the government’s offer.”NHS figures published on Thursday showed flu cases at a record level for the time of year after jumping 55% in a week to an average 2,660 patients in hospital each day last week. Writing in the Times, Streeting said the number of patients in hospital in England could triple by the peak and described the scenes in hospital as “inexcusable”. Dr Chris Streather, a regional medical director at NHS England, said the impact of flu admissions on hospitals was “pretty bad” but it was “nothing like the scale” of the Covid pandemic. Chart showing flu patients in hospitalAsked if talk of the NHS collapsing was over the top, Streather told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “The NHS is coping at the moment.
- The flu rates are still going up.”He added: “It’s well within the boundaries of what we can cope with.
- One of the things we learned during the pandemic was our preparation for coping with large outbreaks of respiratory viruses got better.
