Sheffield's Public Health Director: Pressure on hospitals could last for a 'good few weeks' before reducing
Greg Fell's been assessing how the Omicron variant of Covid-19 will potentially affect hospitals in the city for the next few weeks and other emergency services
Sheffield's Public Health Director believes it'll take a 'good few weeks' before the number of people in hospital across the city with Covid-19 starts to reduce.
The latest figures from Sheffield Teaching Hospitals show that 234 people are currently receiving treatment for the virus.
That number has more than trebled over the festive period though & Greg Fell isn't expecting the pressure to ease any time soon:
"I don't think the number of people in hospital right now is going to reduce quickly.
"What we've seen in every other wave is that it goes up very quickly, but comes down very, very slowly.
"I think that will be the same pattern this time around as well. We'll see a trail off in the case rates in a couple of weeks though, and it's probably fair to say that we'll see less people being admitted to intensive care due to the success of the vaccine rollout."
Over the last week, around 10 thousand people have tested positive for Covid-19 in Sheffield.
Mr. Fell admits this will inevitably have an impact on ambulance response times across the city and the rest of the region:
"Significant numbers of staff that work in the ambulance service have got Covid-19. There's a lot of it about, more now than at any time during the whole pandemic to date.
"If staff are off, they've got to isolate, that's what the law says.
"If those staff happen to be ambulance drivers or paramedics, that's going to have a knock- on consequence on ambulance response times.
"These are the indirect impacts of the pandemic that we will all have to feel the consequences of."