By Ben Kerrigan-
Environment Secretary George Eustice has said the Uk Government is keeping the level of Covid hospital admissions under “very close review”, following the decisions by ministers to add no new restrictions in England before the new year.
He said the evidence did not support more curbs at the moment.
His comments on Tuesday morning came as some medical groups aired concerns that hospitals could be overwhelmed with Covid patients.
The Doctors’ Association UK warned that if the current situation is left to continue, it could have “severe consequences for both patients and NHS staff”.
On Monday, France announced it would be tightening restrictions in the country, by banning eating and drinking on long distance travelling and strictly requiring vaccination passports to enter its night clubs.
Germany also saw protests across its towns and cities in response to its protests.
NHS Providers chief executive Chris Hopson said there has been an increase in the number of Covid patients in hospital, though warned against misinterpreting the data.
He explained to BBC Breakfast there had been a 27% increase in the number of hospital admissions nationally over the past week, and a 45% increase in London.
He said: “In the previous peaks, we’ve had some very seriously ill older people who’ve got really significant respiratory problems and… they had to go into critical care.
“The difference this time is we’ve got quite a few patients who are coming in – they might have fallen off their bike and knocked their head or broken their leg – and what’s happening is they’ve got no symptoms but when they arrive, they’re actually testing positive for Covid.
“Interestingly, the statistics that we use don’t actually distinguish between those two. So we just need to be careful about overinterpreting the data.
“The key bit… is that we still don’t know exactly what’s going to happen at the point when Omicron meets the older population, and clearly we’ve had a lot of intergenerational mixing over Christmas, so we all are still waiting to see, are we going to see a significant number of increases in terms of the number of patients coming into hospital with serious Omicron-related disease.”
Prof Paul Hunter, professor in medicine at the University of East Anglia, told BBC Breakfast that in time people with Covid should be allowed to “go about their normal lives” as they would with a common cold.
“If the self-isolation rules are what’s making the pain associated with Covid, then we need to do that perhaps sooner rather than later,” he said.