London’s field hospital to be used amid acute COVID pressure

LONDON (AP) — Britain’s National Health Service will from next week employ a little-used field hospital specially built at a huge exhibition center in east London in the early days of the pandemic last spring.

NHS England Chief Executive Simon Stevens said Thursday that the pressures facing hospitals in London and the southeast of England are so acute that the Nightingale hospital at the ExCel London will be opened next week to inpatients.

A few hundred beds for non-COVID patients are expected to be available at first.

“The entirety of the health service in London is mobilising to do everything it possibly can but the infections, the rate of growth in admissions, that is what collectively the country has got to get under control,” he said.

The hospital, which will also be a vaccination hub, was one of several built in the spring to help during the pandemic.

They were named after Florence Nightingale, widely considered to be the founder of modern nursing.

In the event, they were barely used and were mothballed for use potentially during further waves of the pandemic.

Stevens said the health service is in the midst of an “incredibly serious situation” with more than 50% more coronavirus inpatients in hospitals across England than April’s peak.

All this is happening when the NHS is at its busiest because of winter-related ailments.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Conservative government has faced criticism for not locking down England earlier — during the Christmas holiday season — given a spike in infections largely blamed on a new variant of the virus around the capital and the southeast of England.

The lockdown came into effect on Tuesday, more than two weeks after scientists warned the new variant was potentially 70% more contagious.

The UK is recording virus-related deaths on a par with some of the worst days of the pandemic.

On Thursday, government figures showed that another 1,162 people were reported to have died within 28 days of testing positive for the virus.

That’s just shy of the record high of 1,224 deaths on April 21.

The UK’s total virus-related death toll is now 78,508.

According to figures compiled by Johns Hopkins University, the UK is again Europe’s worst-hit nation in terms of total COVID-related deaths.

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