The Hague Jan. 8 (U.S.): Troops have been deployed to London hospitals. Healthcare workers with COVID-19 treat patients in France. The Netherlands is under lockdown, the Associated Press (AP) reports, and field hospitals have been set up out of tents in Sicily.
Countries across Europe are scrambling to support strained health systems over staffing shortages blamed on a new transmissible omicron variant of the coronavirus, which is sending a wave of infections crashing the continent.
“Omicron means treating more patients and fewer staff to treat them,” Stephen Boyce, national medical director for Britain’s National Health Service, said on Friday.
The World Health Organization said Thursday that 9.5 million cases of COVID-19 were recorded globally over the past week, up 71% from the previous seven-day period. However, the number of recorded weekly deaths has decreased.
While the omicron appears to be less severe than the rapidly replaced delta variant, especially among vaccinated people, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus cautioned against treating it lightly.
“Just like the previous variants, Omicron is getting people into hospitals, and it is killing people,” he said. “In fact, tsunamis are so huge and so fast that they are overwhelming health systems all over the world.”
That was evident on Friday in London, where about 200 military personnel, including 40 doctors, were deployed to hospitals struggling to provide vital care amid an “exceptional” staff shortage attributed to the number of workers sick or isolated due to COVID-19.
Next week, another 150 soldiers will help the ambulance service in northwest England.
On a visit to London’s King’s College Hospital, Health Minister Sajid Javid warned that hospital admissions were on the rise and that the NHS was facing “a difficult few weeks ahead”.
A total of 39,142 NHS staff at hospital trusts in England were absent due to COVID-19 on 2 January, up 59% from the previous week, according to figures from the National Health Service England.
The UK has also changed its coronavirus testing rules to reduce the amount of time people who test positive have to isolate.
Germany’s leaders agreed on Friday to tighten entry requirements for restaurants and bars, deciding to shorten quarantine and self-isolation periods.
French authorities this week began allowing health care workers who have coronavirus but have few or no symptoms to continue treating patients rather than isolate themselves.
France reported 332,252 cases of the virus per day on Wednesday, the highest number of confirmed cases of the virus in Europe ever.
The Netherlands has been in strict lockdown for weeks, a move aimed at relieving the pressure on overburdened hospitals and buying time for a slow-starting vaccination campaign to ramp up speed.
Despite the lockdown, infections hit record numbers in the country this week.
In Palermo, Sicily, ancillary facilities have been set up in front of three hospitals to relieve pressure on emergency rooms and to allow ambulance crews to transport patients to beds rather than waiting in the parking lot.
Workers in white medical suits and masks pushed ambulances into the tents.
Most of those admitted to hospital with serious symptoms have not been vaccinated, said Tiziana Manisalichi, director of Cervello and Civico Palermo Hospitals.
“We are under absolute pressure,” Manisalichi told The Associated Press. There are at least 70 new cases taken to hospital every day.
We had to set up an additional emergency unit in a tent, because the capacity of a normal emergency unit was not enough.”
Italy reported new daily infections with the Corona virus, with 219,000 new cases recorded on Thursday.
Authorities believe the peak of this increase is still two to three weeks away.
The hospital system is already overwhelmed in the southern Italian city of Naples.
“We risk the collapse of the NHS,” said the head of the local hospital doctors’ union, Bruno Zuccarelli.
He added, “We could see a repeat of the October and November 2020 scenes, which were very, very dangerous.”
The governor of the Campania region surrounding Naples announced on Friday that he plans to postpone the reopening of primary and middle schools on January 10 for at least two weeks because “the conditions are not there to safely reopen”.
Italy’s National Association of Surgeons urged a similar delay across the country, but Italy’s health and education ministries prioritized in-person education and insisted that prevention measures should allow children to return to the classroom from the Christmas break as planned.
The Greek government on Friday issued a civil mobilization order that will come into effect next Wednesday and require some private-sector doctors to support the state health service during an Omicron-driven wave in four northern regions where government hospitals are severely understaffed.
In the UK, which reported nearly 180,000 new cases on Thursday alone, O’Mikron’s advance has forced many workers to stay home and prompted the government to send in troops.
Health service leaders said the military deployment has highlighted how the country is struggling to stay on top of the pandemic.
“We didn’t know this level of staff absenteeism before,” Chand Nagpol, chair of the British Medical Association’s board, told Sky News.
Air Commodore John Lyle told the BBC that the military was still in discussions about providing support to the NHS in other parts of the country.
Nagpol urged action to reduce infection and better protect health care workers from the omicron variant, saying it was important that “the government is not just waiting to get rid of this, because people are suffering every day.”
In Naples, medical leader Zuccarelli said surges in the virus since Italy hit the first wave in 2020 mean children and even infants are now hospitalized with COVID-19.
“The virus is adapting to the environment, we have to make habitat impossible for it to do, and in order to do that, you definitely have to vaccinate,” he said. “Don’t be afraid of vaccination, you should be afraid of COVID.”
AOQ