About 200 soldiers will be deployed to hospitals in London to support the British Public Health Service (NHS), which suffers from increasing absenteeism while increasing income due to the covid-19the Defense Ministry announced on Friday.
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According to NHS England, the body that manages public health in England, on January 2 there were more than 39,000 absences of hospital staff members due to quarantines due to covid-19 infection or contact cases, an increase of 59 percent compared to the preceding week and triple that of early December.
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This includes more than 4,700 absences in London, which has been the epicenter of the new wave of infections due to omicron variant of the coronavirus, although recently it has registered a slight decrease in the number of cases and hospital admissions.
The deployment announced in the capital includes 40 military doctors and 160 auxiliary personnel who will help in the next three weeks to fill the lack of medical personnel infected by the virus.
Defense Minister Ben Wallace celebrated the military’s contribution to the “national effort”, recalling that they have already participated by driving ambulances, administering vaccines or supporting hospitalized patients since the pandemic began two years ago.
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Some 1,800 military personnel are already deployed across the UK, supporting vaccination efforts and ambulance services.
According to the latest official figures released on Thursday, nearly 18,000 people – an increase of 50 percent in a week and the highest number since February – were hospitalized in the country with COVID-19.
The United Kingdom is one of the nations most affected in Europe by the pandemic, with almost 150,000 deaths and record levels of infection, which are around 200,000 daily. However, the number of ventilator patients (875) and deaths (231 on Thursday) is much lower than in previous waves, prompting the government not to tighten restrictions in England for the time being.
Increasing the pressure, the hospital system faces thousands of staff absences, at levels “never seen before”, explained to the channel Sky News the doctor Chaand Nagpaul, president of the British Medical Association (BMA).
Matthew Taylor, director of the NHS Confederation, a group of professionals of the public health, considered that the deployment of 200 troops “would help”, but that the situation will continue to be “very difficult”.
AFP
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