Hospitals in London - Britain's COVID-19 hotspot with over 3,000 of the country's 9,529 confirmed cases - are witnessing wave after wave of seriously ill coronavirus patients, a senior official from the state-funded National Health Service (NHS) said on Thursday as the UK entered day three of its lockdown to curb the pandemic.
Chris Hopson, the chief executive of NHS Providers - the representative body for hospital chiefs, said that they have been getting reports that the rate at which hospital beds are being filled out is extremely alarming even as their staffing levels are dropping as a result of the infection.
"They talk about wave after wave after wave. The words that are used to me are that it's a continuous tsunami. As one said to me, it's much bigger and large numbers with a greater degree of stretch than you can ever have possibly imagined," Hopson told the BBC.
"They are struggling with the explosion of demand in seriously ill patients. They are saying it's the number arriving and the speed with which they are arriving and how ill they are," he said.
The UK government announced the setting up of a makeshift hospital with 4,000 beds to be created at the ExCel conference centre in east London earlier this week, a move welcomed by NHS Providers but with a warning that even that capacity is fast getting filled up in the UK capital. "One advantage we have is the opportunity to learn from what is going on in London, given that London is some way ahead of most of the rest of the country, recognising there are other hotspots elsewhere," said Hopson.
