Hospitals are admitting patients with the Omicron variant for the first time, ministers revealed today, as a senior government medical adviser said the country had to “prepare for the worst”.
Nadhim Zahawi, the education secretary, told Times Radio that ministers were aware of people in hospital with the new variant, which he said could now be responsible for up to a third of all new cases in London.
Dr Susan Hopkins, chief medical adviser for the UK Health Security Agency, described the spread of the new variant as a “wave” that was “coming straight at us” and warned further restrictions beyond working from home might be necessary.
“I think that the restrictions that the government have announced are sensible. I think that we may need to go beyond them. But we’ll need to watch carefully what happens with hospitalisations,” she said.
She added that it was “too early” to make assumptions about the severity of Omicron but warned that even if it turned out to be milder than the existing dominant Delta strain its current growth rate could still put unsustainable pressure on hospital services.
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“We are worried and we’re right to be worried,” she told The Andrew Marr Show on the BBC.
“We have to prepare for the worst and hope for the best. And I think our job is to highlight that this is a big wave. It’s coming straight at us. If we see even half the severity that we saw with Delta then we’re facing a very large number of hospitalisations and potential deaths.”
She added: “We are getting reports of individuals coming into hospital over the last few days with Omicron and we are investigating those carefully with the hospitals concerned.
“We’re also seeing hospitals diagnose more and more people coming through their emergency departments, and we expect to see increases in that number.
“But it’s really important to remember it is just over two weeks since we first detected the cases in the United Kingdom, and that hospitalisations start to be seen in about two weeks and deaths usually at three to four weeks.”
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Zahawi said the UK was in a “race” with the variant as the government expanded its booster campaign. Figures last week showed that two jabs gave less than 20 per cent protection against infection from Omicron while a third jab increased that protection to more than 70 per cent.
He said that, given that cases of new variant were doubling every three days, the country could quickly see more than a million infections.
“Let’s do a mathematic exercise,” he told Sky News. “You get to a million infections by say the end of December — 1 per cent is 10,000 severe infections that could be in hospital. Three days later it is two million, three days later it is four million. Three days beyond that it is eight million.
“That is the risk, that even if it is milder, say 50 per cent milder than Delta, then the numbers are huge — it is a small percentage of a very large population.”
Zahawi told Times Radio there were about 100,000 beds available in the NHS, many of which were occupied by non-Covid patients.
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He said last year’s winter wave resulted in a peak of 28,000 which could easily be reached again.
“If we don’t take action and boost rapidly, you could double that figure,” he said.
In the face of a rebellion by more than 60 Tory backbench MPs against the restrictions announced by Johnson last week Sir Keir Starmer, the Labour leader, said his party would make sure that they were passed by parliament.
“If you look at the science in relation to Omicron, the new variant, there is a real concern that we could be in a situation where the number of cases is doubling in a shorter period of two days,” he said. “So I’m not supporting the prime minister on Tuesday, I’m supporting our NHS, and I’m supporting the public in relation to this pandemic.”
