25% of NHS Doctors are reportedly unable to work due to being off sick or in isolation due to COVID-19
Professor Andrew Goddard, president of The Royal College of Physicians, has said that around a quarter of all doctors in the NHS are off work, either because they have contracted coronavirus or because a family member or housemate is ill.
“At the moment, we think it’s more doctors self-isolating with family members, though there are some off sick themselves.”
“This is really impacting a lot in emergency departments and London is in a much worse position than elsewhere at the moment, but it will come to other places.”
“It will come to other places. Birmingham is also struggling.”
“Of course the worry is we will lose more people to Covid-related illness,” he added.
This news comes as it has been reported that 20,000 former NHS staff have returned to help fight COVID-19 and over 750,000 members of the British public have volunteered to help support the NHS, after Health Secretary Matt Hancock requested 250,000 people to volunteer their time.
A number of UK manufacturers have received a government order to build 10,000 ventilators to help treat coronavirus patients.
The consortium, which includes Rolls-Royce, will produce the medical devices under the name Project Oyster.
It will also jointly scale up production of an existing design known as Project Penguin.
The news follows an announcement from Dyson that it had received an order from Boris Johnson to build 10,000 of its own CoVent devices.
Currently, there are just over 8,000 ventilators available to the NHS.
Government expert Neil Ferguson as he suggests up to 2 million people might already have been infected.
Ferguson has also said to have noticed ‘early signs’ that the highly contagious infection was being curbed by the draconian measure’s being enforced nationwide, with the rate of increase in hospital admissions declining resulting in less stress on the NHS.
Ferguson went on to say how this wouldn’t be shown in the number of fatalities as:
“deaths are lagged by a long time from when measures come in force”.
“But if we look at the numbers of new hospital admissions, that does appear to be slowing down a bit now.” He said.
