Milton Keynes Hospital bracing itself for influx of Christmas rule breakers on Covid wards this week

Doctors say most patients affected seriously start needing hospital treatment between 10 to 12 days after their symptoms begin.

This means the hospital is jam-packed with patients who had already contracted Covid before the festive season. People who caught the virus over Christmas and New Year are expected to reach the peak of their sickness this week.

Dr Joy Halliday, an intensive care consultant at the hospital, said in an interview with the Guardian: “All these people that we’re seeing here are people that were already sick on Christmas Day. They’re about 10 to 12 days into their illness.”

She said this week hospital expects to see an influx of patients from now as a result of Christmas mixing. But already wards are jam-packed with Covid cases, and last week one patient had to be diverted to another hospital out of the area because no beds at MK were available..

“We’re definitely creaking at the seams in the hospital....All of the staff are nervous about the weeks ahead, particularly the anticipated post-Christmas surge. “I genuinely don’t know what we’re going to do. We’re already bursting,” said Dr Halliday.

Sadly, despite the best efforts of doctors and nurses, people are dying almost every day at MK hospital - and some of them are only in their thirties or forties.

England's chief medical officer Professor Chris Whitty has this morning reinforced the gravity of the situation. 'We’ve got to be very clear that we are now at the worst point of this epidemic for the UK,' he told BBC Breakfast.

He added: "We’re now at a situation where in the UK as a whole around one in 50 people is infected and in London it’s around one in 30, in parts of London it’s around one in 20. So there’s a very high chance that if you meet someone unnecessarily they will have Covid".

The case rate for England as a whole is 576 per 100,000 people. Milton Keynes' rate topped 1,000 over the weekend and this is only slightly lower than London.

This means that somewhere between one in 30 and one in 40 people in MK could currently be infected.

Professor Whitty told the BBC: "There's a very high chance that if you meet someone unnecessarily they will have Covid."

"This is everybody's problem. Any single unnecessary contact you have with someone is a potential link in a chain of transmission that will lead to a vulnerable person."

Anybody who is not shocked by the number of people in hospital "has not understood this at all", he said.

There are currently more than 30,000 people with Covid-19 in hospitals throughout England, compared to about 18,000 at the peak of lockdown last April.

At Milton Keynes hospital, consultants are worried that the oxygen to the respiratory wards will run out.

“The oxygen comes via pipes and the pipes have a flow rate, so that pipes can only allow a certain amount of oxygen per minute to flow in them,” said critical care consultant Dr Hamid Manji told the Guardian.

“And so it doesn’t matter really how much oxygen you have in the reservoir. If the pipes can’t deliver it per minute, to all the places that require it, then you have an oxygen shortage," he added.

Pipelines have already been installed into the hospital's day surgery unit and two other general wards to allow them to be repurposed as areas for the sickest Covid patients.

Ten out of the hospital's 14 wards - 60 per cent of all adult beds - are now taken up by coronavirus patients, with many of them fighting for their lives.

Dr Halliday said: “People are terrified of being ventilated this time round. Nobody wants to go on it because they think it’s a death sentence. They think that last time around, it was bad – this time is even worse. So there’s a lot of people that are saying ‘don’t don’t put me on a ventilator’, even knowing that they have no other chance.”

She added: “We know that there are some people that just will not survive no matter what treatment we have.”