Hospitals face ‘bumpy ride’ as Covid rises again, warn health chiefs

Health chiefs are braced for a “bumpy ride” over the coming months amid fears that the latest wave of Covid will push hospitalisations to their highest level in more than a year and that seasonal flu pressures could hit early.

Dr Jenny Harries, the chief executive of the UK Health Security Agency, told the BBC’s Sunday Morning programme that hospital cases with Covid were expected to rise in the weeks ahead, with admissions likely to exceed the April peak driven by the BA.2 subvariant of Omicron. Her comments came days after the Office for National Statistics (ONS) revealed that Covid infections in the UK soared by more than half a million in a week at the end of June, in the latest wave driven by even more transmissible variants of Omicron known as BA.4 and BA.5.

“It doesn’t look as though that wave has finished yet, so we would anticipate that hospital cases will rise. And it’s possible, quite likely, that they will actually peak over the previous BA.2 wave,” Harries said. “But I think the overall impact, we won’t know. It’s easy to say in retrospect, not so easy to model forward.”

At its peak in April, the BA.2 wave in England hospitalised more than 2,000 people a day. The most deadly wave of the pandemic so far came in January 2021 when the Alpha variant pushed daily hospitalisations in England above 4,000 in the early weeks of the vaccination programme.

Harries’s comments prompted a warning from NHS chiefs about the pressures hospitals face. “Trust leaders know they are in for a bumpy ride as they tackle new and unpredictable variants alongside grappling with seasonal flu pressures, which may hit us earlier than usual this year,” said Saffron Cordery, the interim chief executive of NHS Providers.

“The policy of living with Covid does not mean Covid has gone away … we cannot afford to be complacent.”

An estimated 2.3 million people in private households in the UK had Covid in the week ending 24 June, up 32% in a week, according to the ONS.