The question now is not whether Omicron will be bad for the NHS, but whether it will be just dreadful or catastrophic
- Christina Pagel is director of UCL’s Clinical Operational Research Unit
The emergence and rapid spread of the Omicron variant represents the biggest threat to the NHS since last December’s rise of the Alpha variant. The NHS only managed then by reducing much non-Covid work and by putting a brake on the rise of cases with the second lockdown in January 2021. A year later, the lack of urgency in the government response is a danger to us all.
NHS staff are exhausted. They have been working flat out for almost two years. For some of that time they had to struggle with rising numbers of seriously ill patients with Covid-19. When each wave subsided, they turned to the backlog of cases that had built up in the meantime – this enormous backlog started before the pandemic and numbers almost 6 million people. Meanwhile, Covid patients still make up about a quarter of occupied critical care beds.
Christina Pagel is director of UCL’s Clinical Operational Research Unit, which applies advanced analytical methods to problems in healthcare. This article was coauthored by Deepti Gurdasani and Martin McKee
