A hospital on the northern edge of London has become the second hospital in just over a fortnight to declare a critical incident, as the UK suffered its worst day of the coronavirus outbreak so far.
The death toll from the disease jumped by 708 over the previous 24 hours — taking the total to 4,313.
Watford General Hospital asked all patients except mothers in labour to avoid coming to the hospital even in an emergency because of what it called a technical issue with the hospital’s oxygen equipment.
“A small number of patients are being transferred to other hospitals in the area, with each patient being fully assessed in line with existing safety guidelines before they are moved,” the trust said.
Covid-19, which can cause severe inflammation of patients’ lungs, has led hospitals to put unprecedented numbers of patients simultaneously on either ventilators or continuous positive airway pressure machines, putting far more strain than normal on hospitals’ oxygen supply systems.
West Herts Hospitals NHS Trust, the hospital’s operator, said Saturday’s incident posed no risk to the facility’s patients.
Michael Gove, the Cabinet Office secretary, revealed the latest death toll at the government’s daily press briefing on Saturday, where he reiterated that people should stay at home during the sunny weekend in order to halt the spread of the virus.
Temperatures in London are expected to reach 20C on Sunday.
So far 183,190 coronavirus tests have been conducted in the UK, of which 41,903 have proved positive and 15,073 people have been admitted to hospital with Covid-19 symptoms.
Public Health England said that 10,984 tests were carried out in the previous day in England alone.
Last week the government set a new target of 100,000 tests a day — including antibody tests to confirm people who had already had the virus — by the end of this month.
The UK has been criticised for its slow rate of testing — Germany, for example, has tested five times more people.
Britain’s economically damaging lockdown could be eased before the end of May and replaced with a system of mass community testing, according to Neil Ferguson, one of Boris Johnson’s top advisers on the coronavirus outbreak.
However, he said such a plan would require the production of swab tests to be increased to the “tens of thousands” — perhaps 50,000 a day.
During the past week, according to reports, NHS England issued an urgent warning to hospitals about the risks from heavy demand for oxygen after it said an unnamed London teaching hospital nearly ran out of oxygen last weekend because of the number of patients receiving help with their breathing.
The notice warned hospitals that the sudden addition of large numbers of patients to the oxygen system presented the risk that the whole system would fail, cutting off support to every patient attached to it.
It also warned of the risk that hospitals’ liquid oxygen reservoirs could become depleted far more quickly than normal given the large numbers of patients depending on the system.
Mr Gove said on Saturday that the UK had received 300 ventilators from China and expected to take delivery of more from domestic industrial groups beginning this weekend.
One of those groups, involving University College London and Mercedes-Benz, has had its new device clinically approved. The group has made 250 continuous positive airway pressure devices and aims to start producing 1,000 a day from next week.
More ventilators are being sourced from other countries, including Germany and Switzerland, and should start arriving soon, Mr Gove added.
Meanwhile, Stephen Powis, medical director for NHS England, said he was “disgusted” by “dangerous nonsense” online suggesting 5G phone masts were spreading coronavirus, calling it “the worst kind of fake news”.
Police are investigating several fires involving phone masts, believing they could be arson.
